


imagine a knife

by watername



Category: SHINee
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bloodplay, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Internalized Homophobia, Knifeplay, M/M, Magical Realism, Mentioned Choi Minho, Mentioned Kim Jonghyun, Mentioned Lee Taemin, Minor Kim Jonghyun/Choi Minho, psychological exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:53:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25796194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watername/pseuds/watername
Summary: There is the figure he seeks: he is rolling slim shoulders to slide off a jacket lined in grey fur. His hair is buzzed short, the red dye vibrant in the minimal space. Glasses perch at the edge of his nose, a gold chain hanging from each temple, scooping low to trace along his collarbones. His nails are a vicious red that tap at this phone, and his gaze over the metallic rims is concentrated fully on it.An ugly, unnatural hollow expands and instinctively collapses in Jinki's throat as he looks away.
Relationships: Kim Kibum | Key/Lee Jinki | Onew
Comments: 18
Kudos: 27
Collections: K-Ficcer's Works, Summer of SHINee Round 2





	imagine a knife

**Author's Note:**

> This work is based on the extremely good short film _[kiss of the rabbit god](https://vimeo.com/344981433)_.
> 
> regarding the self-harm tag: no one proactively engages in self-harming behaviors. there is reference to an individual being reckless with their own safety, out of unwell tendencies.
> 
> intro manip provided by the spectacular conniecorleone

* * *

There is a man. 

There was a man. 

There will always be a man.

* * *

The fan inside the restaurant prods at the solid, hot wall of air, gives up, and calls it circulation. Beneath it, a pilot light ticks away reluctantly. 

Jinki scrapes the back of his hand against cheek stubble, and brings it away damp with sweat. 

As he backs up against the door to the alley, and presses his weight against it, one of the trash bags slips through his fingers, and tumbles onto the pavement. He takes a moment for a deep breath to run through him, wallowing in the detour. The air quavers from the traffic and breezes kicked up by the motion, the fumes. 

His knee buckles as he retrieves the bag and swings it into a sideways pitch. He releases; it hits the open lid with a wet, grimy noise. Treating the rest of the bags the same, he wipes his hands against his apron.

The place where he has his hair pushed back by a headband is wet. He reaches to corral the few escaped strands away from loitering at the corner of his eye. 

With a bitten-down sigh, he presses the heel of his hand against the small of his back, and twists to the side and down. The squashed takeout from someone’s break turns his stomach unpleasantly - he flicks his gaze up instead.

The quilt of the sky is a bumpy grey, with its eastern binding dimming to dark blue, and its western a burnt orange from the setting sun. It reflects an ugly tinge on the stop sign at the end of the alley, where a pigeon alights on it before fluttering on, launching hopefully to the next identical street.

When Jinki pulls the door back open, the restaurant air settles like a dry cloth over his lips. The bell at the front has a demand to be met.

* * *

There is a man.

Please, imagine the following: 

The cloth covering his mouth, how rough it is, how it makes heedless marks on skin. How thick it is, like heavy mud laid atop the shallow grave of his throat. How his mouth dries, and his tongue shrivels. 

The fabric stretched tight across his eyes; the width of it obscuring the inquisitive, arching bones of his brow.

Ropes, looped around the delicate, birdlike bones of his wrists. Here, see the pink rawness, frail translucency scrubbed open. Feel the arthritis of his hands, his aching marrow.

Imagine this man - smothered, buried, wrapped too tight to breathe. Knotting around his ankles. The bonds that have hobbled, have suffocated him. 

Now.

Imagine a knife.

* * *

Table four has ordered _dak kalguksu_. The heat seeps through the dish and into Jinki's hands as he arranges the serving tray. The latticed screen allows him a passing look over the white, wiry heads of table seven. There is the figure he seeks: he is rolling slim shoulders to slide off a jacket lined in grey fur. His hair is buzzed short, the red dye vibrant in the minimal space. Glasses perch at the edge of his nose, a gold chain hanging from each temple, scooping low to trace along his collarbones. His nails are a vicious red that tap at this phone, and his gaze over the metallic rims is concentrated fully on it. 

An ugly, unnatural hollow expands and instinctively collapses in Jinki's throat as he looks away. 

The dish slops back and forth when Jinki sets it down. He has a momentary rush of fear, an anticipation of a necessary apology, but it comes to nothing. The customer reaches out to steady it and makes no comment, removing the dish and centering it perfectly in front of him, even as Jinki reaches out to do the same.

“Ah,” he says, stalled, before bringing his hands back to his apron, and moving on. “ _Dak kalguksu_ ,” he recovers, unfailingly polite. 

The customer rolls the chopsticks between his fingers before using one to break the surface of the soup.

"Can I get you anything else?" he asks. The remnants of anxiety tuck away like a wounded dog, into spaces unnoticed unless looked for: he flexes at the arches of his feet, tightens the muscles at the back of his calves, cracks his knuckles covertly behind his back. With the ritual motions done, it’s easier to ignore that the flare of anxiety ever happened.

The customer looks up to meet Jinki's eyes. He speaks - "Tea, please" - with a low, unbothered voice. The collar of his shirt is loose; he has a mole beneath his right ear. 

When the collapsed hollow in Jinki's throat tremulously pulses, he can - he will - ignore that as well. It is a victory from bitter practice.

* * *

There was a man. Here is his short tale:

He loves another man. He holds his hand up to his cheek; he plucks a kiss from giving lips. 

Then, there was a dead man. His murder took longer than the kiss, an array of merciless minutes against a single heartbeat of delight.

Now, look: there is the god, a defiant blossom from a buried root. The dead man has flowered. 

The god travels. He descends to earth; his path marked by the spindly, stubborn weeds that sprout from secrets and shame.

* * *

The _boricha_ , Jinki places with a clink just above the customer's right hand. There is an elongated, funhouse reflection in the silver ring he wears on his pinkie. He nearly touches Jinki as he traces the edges of his cup - his fingers brim at the height to close the distance between them. There is a new, inexorable curiosity to his tone, when he asks: 

"Are you hurt?"

Jinki feels perplexity contort his face as he glances down, and spies the open wound that bisects the creases of his thumb. It’s an inch-long slice, red and fresh, blood welling wetly at the edges of dry skin.

"Oh," he says. He felt nothing, not even pain. "I guess I am."

With a rush, he comes back to himself, his thoughts sparking like a dull knife against a whetstone. He has an open wound at a dining table. Quick to take a step back, to hold his hand close but not close enough to smear blood against his shirt, he stammers.

"I'm so sorry, I can get you a fresh cup - "

"No, no, it's okay," the customer says. His brown eyes are kind, understanding. The hollow in Jinki’s throat has disappeared at the sight; it is now his heart, unwilling to yield or slow, jolted into a skip that keeps lifting higher and higher, the longer the customer looks at him. He takes one of the napkins from the dispenser and presses it towards Jinki, the smallest point of pressure creating a flare of pain at last - "Go take care of yourself first."

He bows his head briefly in apology and rushes to the bathroom. The cold water runs over the open wound. There’s an empty space in Jinki’s mind, where an unchecked thought futilely struggles to place the moment when the blade met his skin.

* * *

He is eleven. 

He hears that there are things he is supposed to want. There are things he will do, he has to do, he must, he’s a growing boy who will have urges - _Jinki, did you see - have you ever_ \- and he shakes his head, flushing. The others around him, their faces reddened and giddy with excitement, don’t seem to notice, or misunderstand his worry.

It happens suddenly - his friends whisper theories and boast wildly; his father stumbles through analogies; his teachers arm themselves with photos and dire warnings. 

They mention, haltingly - perhaps, a man and a man - but move past it, the boy beside Jinki has an ugly sneer. They talk of safety, the importance of it, the scope and intended audience squeezed tight and exclusive. 

Jinki doesn’t want what the others obsess over: he is cold with certainty, frail with fear. 

A lie, a deference, provides a shield against the harshness - perhaps - he could, if he tried, with the right person. 

He is thirteen. 

His throat bobs, drowning slow in successive waves. His lips press against hers, his thoughts deliberately fixing on the things he likes about her: she is kind, and she laughs at his jokes; she carefully eats her food and wipes her hands clean; and she enjoyed the book last week, talking excitedly with him about it over lunch. She is his friend. 

When he pulls away, his eyes crack open to find her smile, an open and nervous thing. She was nervous too, and he realizes it with relief, and he thinks - _it wasn't so bad, it wasn't so -_

He is nineteen. 

He has resoundingly failed. Pain erupts in the dusky space beneath his belly button, like something is bursting to escape the cage of his body.

"Hyeyoung, please - it's not your fault, I'm sorry - "

She is embarrassed and angry. Fury is making her tearful. Jinki can't weep with her. He can't do anything, when all he wants to do is rip himself apart, and let his insides slip out into a wet pile on the floor; until all that was left was what he could claw out beneath neat, trimmed fingernails. 

He can't, though; he has soft, gentle hands, and there is nothing to help provide the necessary bite, nothing but the comfortable softness of a bed, the scratchy familiarity of well-used blankets, freshly washed.

“Don’t talk to me at class tomorrow,” she finally says as she gathers up her things. She slides her feet into her shoes. Her eyes are puffed, and wet.

Beneath the anger, there's something close, dangerously scuttling near sympathy. This makes it worse. He nods, he says nothing else - there's nothing else to be said, except - 

It's not her fault. He's sorry. 

Even after she leaves, Jinki nods again. His thoughts crash over and over into each other, wearing him into nothing. Knuckles whiten, nails dig into his palms as he clenches his fists in resolution. The pain is called up in small waves that he lets wash over him, like tidewater between his toes, as he tells himself it won’t be that way again, he will chip off all the pieces of his being that could bring hurt to himself or others.

* * *

He is twenty-six.

Rent is split down the middle between himself, and a friend of a childhood acquaintance. He moves ungainly around Jonghyun, their new co-occupation of the space, and the restless, blundering motions of new independence. 

Jonghyun does not move aside for Jinki. When they sit down to allocate the chores, the bill priorities, the guidelines of guests, he makes light comments and questions that invite friendship, commiseration on newfound adulthood, that Jinki shies away from. He plans to live quietly, solitarily, but the cost of living does him in. 

When Jonghyun invites him to go out, his case slung over his shoulder, Jinki waves him off. It becomes easier over time, the offers coming less often, Jonghyun learning to assume refusal beforehand.

It’s only when he’s away, Jinki lets the weighty need get the better of him. He lies in bed, his phone in one hand. Images reflect in his eyes until they are no longer needed, the lids squeezing shut when his climax comes. He bites his lips red as he finishes, ever fearful that someone will hear, that he has mistaken his roommate’s absence. 

He closes the tabs quickly, the men there shooed away once he is done. He wipes his hands carefully clean after each time. He never plans for guests. 

Jonghyun hosts his friends in small groups, and has the occasional date Jinki politely greets in the morning. Sometimes she is collecting her things; sometimes she occupies the table, Jonghyun nearby, pouring cereal into a pair of bowls. 

There is a morning, a near year into their arrangement. The potential for a lease renewal hovers anxiously at the back of Jinki’s mind, and he walks out of his bedroom to find one of Jonghyun’s friends standing at the open fridge door. 

“Hey, morning,” Minho says. His hair is awry, stuck up from sleep yet.

“Morning.”

Jonghyun walks out of the bathroom, scrubbing at his hair, and walks over to his friend. 

“You’re wasting our electricity,” he scolds the taller man, and Minho scoffs, leaning down to rebuff him with a kiss, moving with easy familiarity. Jonghyun goes to his tiptoes to push back, invoking a smile to Minho’s lips, the ends of it barely visible to Jinki across the room. When they separate, Jinki can see Jonghyun start to turn to face and greet him, clearly intent to invite him into the teasing.

He walks quickly to the bathroom, instead, closing the door behind him without a word. The shower is still damp; he throws it on and steps beneath the stream, but the walls are thin, and he can hear the motion, the quiet conversation in the other room. He has lost the feeling at the tips of his fingers, fumbling to adjust the hot water. 

When he comes out, neither of them offer any conversation. When Jinki passes the space to his bedroom doorway and glances back, Jonghyun doesn’t return his gaze. 

He leaves for work without comment. The situation gnaws at his thoughts all day, unrelenting until he gets back, Jonghyun greeting him from the small kitchen table. The jacket slung over his shoulders is defiantly Minho’s.

“Is there a problem?” he asks without preamble. Jinki has come back later than normal, and he wonders how long Jonghyun has waited, unwilling to let him avoid this. His backpack strap digs into his chest and he struggles to remove it and to find the response. 

“No, no, of course not,” he says, through the thorny tumble in his chest.

He won’t be that person. He knows that, enough. Jonghyun is kind. He is a night owl, up when Jinki returns after closing; he asks, politely insistent, after his meals instead of letting him go directly to bed, or leaves out leftovers if there are some to be had and he is out with his friends. The few invitations he has issued have all been carefully low-key: a small group, a coffeehouse, a reading. 

And Minho - his friend, his boyfriend - is equally good-natured. His energy is more boisterous than Jonghyun’s, but he’s never treated him poorly, or made his presence an intrusion. All the awkwardness that has sprung up, the nausea of uncertainty - Jinki is the one at fault, unable to reconcile himself to their sweeter reality. 

It’s obvious in retrospect, even: when they had talked about the matter of relationships, about others staying over, Jonghyun had been so careful not to assign pronouns or genders. All Jinki could think of was his own paranoia, and what Jonghyun could have gleaned from their casual acquaintance - about what was obvious just from looking at Jinki. He didn’t think outside of himself.

Now, Jonghyun looks at him in a new, careful light that cascades hot shame down Jinki’s throat. He can wait and discover if he’s considered a bigot or a coward in Jonghyun’s eyes, shortly enough.

“Minho’s a good guy,” he says again. His smile feels weak, but he persists, unable to face further investigation. “I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable, and I’m sorry for running out. You two seemed to be having a moment, and I didn’t want to intrude - and I - I had to get to work.”

The lies are apparent, but Jonghyun releases him with a nod. 

They go on living together, despite this. The debris from the encounter is embedded into the walls, splintering the tentative structure they had erected.

* * *

When he goes out to check on table 4, the wrapping of his wound is hidden away in the apron’s pocket. The customer glances half-up from his phone, stopping at Jinki’s waist, at where his wrist plunges into the dark blue cloth. 

"Everything okay?" Jinki asks. His voice falters in its lightness towards the end, as the customer tips his head to the side in contemplation, as though he has to thoroughly consider everything that has led up to this question before giving it an answer. 

The eventual concession, though, is a twitch of his lips, tugging along the length of his mouth. At last, it reveals its secrets, that it was a smile all along, charming in its reservation. 

"Shouldn't I be asking you that?" he teases back, flustering Jinki badly.

He awkwardly pulls his hand half-out, wanting to prove that he’s done the right thing in covering it up. It should also be a silent reminder that the customer doesn’t need to bother asking after him more, but he refuses to obey the norms. He reaches out his hand, palm turned slightly up.

“What’s your name?”

“Jinki,” he answers. 

“Can I see your hand, Jinki?” he asks, curling his fingers in. Jinki obeys - he can’t seem not to, not at the prospect of the smooth, pale palm, the lines of an unimaginable life that could hold a man like that. He remembers himself just enough not to drop his hand fully, holding back so the edge of the first band-aid, just beneath his nail, is grazed. 

He has elegant fingers, and an elegant, graceful touch.

“Very nicely wrapped,” the customer declares, seemingly pleased. He reaches further to turn the examination into a handshake. “I’m Kibum.”

“I’m Jinki,” he says, and then winces. There’s a crinkle of amusement in Kibum’s face, but before he can say anything, before either of them can pull away, the phone starts ringing. Kibum gets to it first, his hand fluttering to the side, to the nearly empty cup, while Jinki’s feet take him backwards. His groping hands are unable to find the receiver blindly; he turns away from Kibum only when he is forced to. 

After he answers, he is being greedy, and turns back to take in Kibum again, but it’s for nothing: his reward is a vacant table four, some bills barely visible from where they are tucked beneath the bowl. 

“Yes - yes - for five - “ Jinki re-focuses on the voice on the other end. His amorphous disappointment is pushed beneath other preoccupations, the summoning shouts from the kitchen, the way the pen’s ink has dried out, paling from red to pink as he scrawls. 

* * *

The night clouds over, obscuring the moon through Jinki’s window as he strips for the shower. When he ducks his head beneath the stream, an unending series of hibernating thoughts rouse to be acknowledged. There’s a paycheck due next week, as he scrubs shampoo into his hair. His tips have been poor, as he soaps up his feet, propped against the shower wall. The laundry room card needs more money to put onto it, as he leans against his forearms, the water sliding down his back. The bar slips out of his hands. He aches as he bends down to get it. 

When he finishes and has dried sufficiently, he collapses face-first into his mattress. A spring digs into his hip, and he twists away from it onto his side. After he reaches out to wake up his computer, it hums, loud and intrusive. The light from it is overbearingly bright and he scrolls through until he finds a video to fall asleep to. 

Within moments, his eyelids begin to list, succumbing to exhaustion.

But - the video jumps to an ad, stealing him from his half-sleep, and he fumbles to close it out. When he does, the only light is the lettering of his alarm clock, no longer even used. It was due to be replaced years ago.

It glows a dark red at him. _It’s a few shades off from Kibum_ , his brain whispers, and there again, whittled down but present - the twitching hollow in his throat, the erratic skip in his heart. 

He turns away from it decisively. A cool whisper of air from the open window brushes over his arm hair, trailing down until it reaches his thumb, the slice uncovered. It bites, a little, and Jinki hides it away, clutching it against his chest protectively.

When he surrenders again to sleep, he dreams. 

* * *

There will always be a man.

Jinki sits in a space. It is barely defined as such as he takes in the few shapes formed in the void. There is some hard object beneath him as a seat. There is a light, the restaurant sign, glowing neon. And here is Kibum, the length of two outstretched arms away.

\- or perhaps, not. It is, Jinki considers, too subdued to be the man as he knows him. 

No, indeed: it’s an old, loving likeness of the man, nothing more. It is red marble carved with care by a talented, awestruck supplicant. The warm, lifelike nature of it captures the light in his eyes, the notch in his brows. Even his hand, outstretched, is full of energy and desire. 

The hand falls, the likeness vanishes and is replaced in an instant. 

There is a man now. He could have a name, it may even be Kibum. If his hair were short, red, it changes in a moment too fast for Jinki to catch, growing the length of a year in the blink of an eye. Black roots come in, inkish, silky. 

Yes, Jinki could see this as Kibum: yes, this could be the dreams he knows, where a passing acquaintance takes on different clothing, different mannerisms, and yet they are still known to be that person. The subconscious filters and interprets to suit its own erratic design. 

The image - the man himself - shudders, cringing in on himself. His hair changes again, fading from black to a plain, dark brown. It is roughened by uncleanliness and partially covered by a cloth wrapping around his head. There is even one last bit of red, at the very end of a strand that curls about his ear, and then disappears beneath the ragged edge of fabric. 

The man stands up, and there is no thought of stillness. He will not wait, patient, for Jinki to examine and distantly observe. He is in motion; he tenses and springs forward to dart past Jinki, paying him no mind. A sly grin, obvious pleasure, radiates from him like a summer breeze; the sleeves of his old-style robe dances as he moves.

Jinki hears his laugh of delight and the private, joyful sounds of lovers reunited, and his heart yearns to know.

When he turns, he intrudes: Kibum, identity made certain in his silenced shock. He is embracing a shadow that has burned away between his fingers, and his face is bloodied with scrapes and dirt. His dancing robes are torn open in the middle. He falls to his knees. 

Jinki watches. 

Kibum brings a hand to his chest - here, there is a broken nail hanging loose, like a petal on a dying flower - and he lays it flat against his sternum in grief. 

A choking noise - he pitches forward as if someone had put their foot against his back and pushed. Snow litters down around Kibum, dotted with red and grey on the ground, one hand and one trembling arm keeping him up. Blood spills, burbling, from his mouth.

There is silence, and then there is not.

This trembling arm - its hand clenches, nails digging into the hard, frozen earth, and the earth yields first. Kibum breathes himself up, a ragged man with iron in his eyes. 

He pulls his hand away from his chest, grieving, and for a moment there is simply the pale expanse of tight muscle. The empty hand reaches out into the darkness and plucks from it a knife. He holds it flat against his skin. 

Jinki watches.

Kibum turns the knife in on himself: a pirouette, a twist. He carves shallow paths into the horizon of his chest. He is methodical, purposeful in intent. He does not flinch. He does not shrink as skin and muscle fall from his chest in strings.

When he finishes, he looks up. He is once again Kibum as Jinki knows him - he is clothed in red, his hair shorn. The difference - his shirt is pulled open, and his chest pulled apart, proudly displaying the symbol he has made of himself, a self-penned testament to his own freedom, written into his own flesh. 

He opens his mouth to speak, and so does Jinki. He doesn’t know his own words, he waits to see what they will be in this world - 

He wakes up, weary, early sunlight laid across his bed. He goes to the bathroom, and finds a broken nail, a dark red lining of blood.

* * *

Retrieving food for his Friday break - just before the dinner rush - is an unwelcome prospect. Jinki has dragged out a chair and seated himself at the side of the building, avoiding the tree that will weep dry leaves onto his spare plate. He sits, crossing one leg over the other to balance better the dish; the off-color laces of his shoe dangle in the wind. 

The sun is out shining. After he bolts down his food - he barely tastes it - Jinki turns his face up to enjoy. He closes his eyes reflexively when a glint of it reflects on a window across the way, piercing into his eyes.

He doesn’t need to see, though, for how he’d like to end out his break. He blindly digs into his pocket to pull out the carton and lighter. The perfectly dark taste of tobacco hits his lungs and he lets out a sigh and leans back to savor it. Some of the tension sloughs off his shoulders, driven away with the warmth of the sun that gently presses against his skin and the indulgent, reckless burn of the cigarette.

After he’s taken a few drags, he opens his eyes again, tilting his head down too late to avoid the glare. The obscuring sunspots swim away as he blinks, and Kibum waits behind them. He is across the street, his hand held up, a cigarette settled between his index and middle fingers. His face quirks inquiringly, and it takes a moment for Jinki to recognize and to lift his lighter to issue the invitation. 

Their brief interaction is a few days past, the dream has declawed in time, reduced to a palatable haze.

When Kibum approaches, after patiently waiting for a break in the traffic, ignoring the crosswalk, Jinki ignites the lighter and holds it up. Kibum barely has to bend to reach it. The flame flickers in his sunglasses. 

He sucks on the cigarette quickly, offering a “thanks” and leaning against the wall an arm’s reach from Jinki. It unsettles Jinki, who expected him to move on after getting what he needed, sure to have something else to preoccupy his time. He puts his plate to the side, slings his fingers against one another in a clasp, then undoes it, his thoughts fiddling with themselves. 

He settles on giving an idle comment, but when he looks up, here he finds an outstretched knife instead. The blade is naked on Kibum’s palm; its trajectory from the point is a confrontational line to Jinki’s heart. 

“What is it? - Hey, what’s wrong?”

It’s Kibum asking, somewhere above him, but it’s quite distant from this world that Jinki is the sudden and sole occupant of, a lonely tenant with the singular, dedicated promise of a knife.

Jinki shakes his head, fierce in rejection, fuelled by Kibum’s continued interjections that only grow louder. There is no knife, he sees - it is simply an extended arm, a flickering ember at the end of it.

“What?” Jinki asks. He leans back, so sharp the chair nearly tilts. “Sorry, I mean. I’m a little out of it.”

“No kidding,” Kibum puts the cigarette out on the wall, and rolls his head, neck cracking beneath the motion. A black belt lashes the tight narrowness of his hips, and Jinki’s eyes catch on them briefly, snagged like a loose thread. “Did you close last night?”

At Jinki’s nod, he sighs.

“I bet you opened today, too - “ he nods again. “Is there much left, on your break?” 

He turns around, stretches so he can crack the front door open and spy the clock behind the cashier stand. 

“About five minutes.”

“What a fucking joke,” Kibum says, unexpectedly. As Jinki sits back, his face comes back into view, twisted into a regally sharp dissatisfaction. “Is that all you’ve eaten today?”

His fingers tap against the wall, staining on the ash. He has an unapologetic anger. 

“No,” he says. He is being honest enough, but the other man’s shoulders are held tight, squared up as though bracing for a hit.

One of the other busboys, Taemin, pops open the door - an obvious delegation, Jinki knows him, that he doesn’t care as long as Jinki looks the other way at his own occasional absences - and tells him his break is up. 

Jinki looks up to say anything to Kibum, to close out this interlude. The other man exudes a bitter puff of smoke that halts anything more than a feeble “bye”, but the word seems to cut through Kibum’s thoughts, enough that he releases the cigarette, letting it dangle loosely from his lips, and curls his fingers in a distracted wave goodbye. 

When they enter the restaurant, Taemin lets the door swing shut behind them, swinging his shoulder to knock against his, persistent until Jinki relents and gives him a cigarette, too. The younger man turns, walking backwards; he issues an off-kilter salute he maintains until he crashes against the back door to start his own break.

Jinki washes up, quiet in his thoughts, soaping at the ashy stains at the edges of his fingers. After rinsing, he lastly scrubs the remaining water into his scalp for relief. Droplets escape against the back of his neck, soon to evaporate in the heat. 

The hairs there are growing long against his neck, and he thinks of the opposite - a short buzz, bristly beneath curious, intimate fingers. As he walks out, he glances through the front windows, and sees that Kibum has moved on. His distant figure is only getting further away the longer Jinki watches.

“Jinki, eh, what are you doing? You’ve got -” one of the cooks gestures behind him, thick fingers cupping around the back of his neck.

He reaches up to follow the motion, and a dot of blood decorates his finger. He ducks back into the bathroom. As he turns his head, he can see the broken corner of a cut, blood sliding to form a necklace.

* * *

“Hey - hey, hyung,” Taemin yells above the noise at the kitchen the next day. It jerks Jinki out of his preoccupation of tilting the silverware loudly into the open sink.

 _Hyung_ \- Taemin is the only one young enough in the restaurant to call him that without stumbling over the word, with an easy first-generation familiarity, and he doesn’t do it often, only when he wants something - 

It takes him a moment to rustle up the memories of third-generation, the syllables unwieldy in his mouth. 

“Maknae,” he says back, half beneath his breath. He’s an only child, and long past the point where he spoke tentative Korean with his grandparents, the paper-thin weight of his grandmother’s hand in his more solid one. 

“You lived with Jonghyun Kim, right?” 

“Yeah - “ Jinki does look up at him, pausing over his sorting. He scours over his memory, to find the point where Taemin would even know that, and settles uncertainly on the once or twice he had to ask his then-roommate for a ride. “I did. He moved in with his boyfriend a couple years ago.”

“Okay,” Taemin considers him. “Did you know he did shows, right? It’d be weird if you didn’t, but I don’t know, you are old - “

“Table five! Taemin!”

“Be right back,” he says, before Jinki can ask or object that Taemin is just a few years younger than him. He washes up and dries, goes to ferry water to a few tables, and before he can get back to the kitchen Taemin catches up with him.

“Anyway, he’s got a show tomorrow - and we both have the day off. I was thinking we could go together.”

“Together?” Jinki keeps himself from looking at him, concentrating on his steps, the ones that take him steadily past the bathrooms and the storeroom.

“Yeah, like you could get me in,” he explains with easy presumption. 

“Get you in - Taemin.” The moment of discomfort dissolves in a puff. Jinki looks at him askance as they stop in front of the loading door. “I haven’t seen him in years. He’s moved out. We’re not close.”

The other man shrugs narrow shoulders and starts pulling down boxes, putting the first two in Jinki’s arms without asking.

“So? Ex-roommate is closer than a stranger,” he shifts the weight of his own balance for the single purpose of gesturing at himself. “I put off getting you inside the other day by like 10 minutes. Come on, hyung. Help me out?”

Jinki grunts as he moves, the boxes make the pain in his back twinge. 

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

* * *

Sunset paints the front of his building; the entryway is dappled through the trees as he pulls the door open with a sigh of relief. When he gets to his apartment, he pulls his phone out to place on the table, taking note of the email notifications, and some news over Twitter he reminds himself not to look at, not if he wants to sleep. 

A bang comes through the wall, then a disdainful shout over a television program. With a rising note of irritation, Jinki pulls out his messages app and scrolls till he finds a long-inactive exchange, timestamped two years earlier.

_jjongd: all settled in_

_jjongd: the key’s on the table, hope you can find a new place soon!_

_jinkil: yeah me too. gl with the new place_

He doesn’t have to do anything. He can put it away, and lose himself with something else that doesn’t threaten his stomach with knots. It gets pushed aside, only an intermittent nag, as he puts himself through the motions of heating up a meal, flickering through the TV until he settles on a game show rerun.

The host makes some smooth motion, inevitably one he’s done hundreds of times before, and the repetition strikes against Jinki’s chest, forcibly reminding him of his own stale routine. Before he can think of it, he fumbles for his phone.

 _jinkil_ : _hey, sorry to reach out to you like this. I hope you are doing well. A coworker of mine says that you are booking shows?_

He hovers over sending it before pressing his thumb down. It is marked **read** in an instant, the switchover making Jinki’s breath stutter in his mouth. 

_jjongd: hey i am! good to hear from you...._

_jjongd: small ones when i can_

Jinki hesitates on what to say, now that he’s reached this point. It occurs to him, belatedly, painfully, that Taemin’s request was not just outdated, it was tactless. A new message pops up as he treads water. 

_jjongd: did you want to come?_

_jjongd: you’re always welcome_

_jinkil: its my coworker._

_jinkil: feels like i missed out on your fame_

Jonghyun would respect honesty. His fingers move over the screen.

_jinkil: he thinks if i ask you you can make room for him._

_jjongd:_ _＠＾▽＾＠_

_jjongd: sure both of you just let me know when youre here._

The assumption is obvious, in retrospect. Taemin would probably appreciate being able to get in on his own, unsaddled with Jinki’s companionship, and he could revert into the default the pair of them know well, the deferral and rejection at his fingertips. As he mulls, the peeling scab itches at his thumb, the uneven nail growing in catches at the corner of the phone case. He bites at his lip, and shifts; the cut at the nape of his neck pulls uncomfortably. The little pains, here and there, he got for doing nothing.

An image from his dream, half-forgotten, re-forms in his mind: whelmed over with happiness, even if it was put out with grief so painfully. He remembers too, his alien, disassociated observation of it. 

_jinkil: ok. address? and time?_

* * *

Taemin slaps him on the back in happiness, when they are let in without a second glance. Jinki glances down at his phone once more, his last message to Jonghyun gone unanswered, sent seven minutes past - 

From what Jonghyun had said, he expected something small, like one of the minimal bars or late-night coffee shops. The inside of this building is a large, open gallery space with a stage at one end, and a balcony overhanging from the other, flanking wings to each side. People stream in and out the narrow corridors constructed out of displays, open chained-walls paintings and drawings are hung onto, boxes full of prints getting flipped through. One particularly lengthy clump gathers around a serving counter, the bottles against mirrored glass. 

The crowd is all ages, mostly represented by those his age or younger, yet somehow he has the unerring sense of being out of place. His eyes skid across others wearing jeans, plain shirts, keeping a jacket tucked between their arm and body, but it’s obvious with each moment he doesn’t belong here, where people exclaim proudly over art, drum their fingers in some unheard melody, laugh loudly and confidently in a circle of peers. Even Taemin has disappeared from his side.

“Jinki!” The call is a welcome intrusion, and he turns gratefully even as the back of his mind processes it’s not Jonghyun’s at all, it’s pitched lower, it’s comfortingly assertive - 

“Minho,” he greets. His fingers release from the white-knuckled fist he had created. The other man is unchanged, and it instantly helps Jinki feel more at ease regardless of anything else sitting unspoken between them. Here, there is some rock that didn’t wear away over the years, even if he’s well outside of his comfort zone. 

“Jonghyun’s busy getting ready, he’s sorry he didn’t meet you at the door, but you understand - and you must have your phone muted for the show?” Jinki nods. “Yeah, he sent you a text but didn’t get any response. So - “ he gestures at himself, and Jinki realizes with a start he’s already a few drinks in, flushed red and hyped up. “Want a drink?”

“Yeah, just a beer - “ Minho reaches past him easily, ingratiating him into a small space. Within just a few minutes, there’s a bottle pressed into Jinki’s hands, and he’s being walked up a staircase, getting a rundown on Jonghyun’s life since he exited from Jinki’s.

“ - he found a great collective that he’s been writing for, and that’s been bringing in some money, but he doesn’t get to perform too often. We were fucking surprised that you even heard about it - or, your - coworker did, right?” Minho turns, eyebrows up in interest. Jinki hems in response, suddenly reminded he has no idea where Taemin is since they entered.

“Right - Taemin,” he says absentmindedly, looking over the railing at the sea of people. 

When Minho settles in next to him, apparently to stay, he finally pauses, eyes flickering over Jinki in thought. 

“He was really glad you said yes, by the way. Really glad.”

Jinki laughs a little at that, unable to conceive of anyone missing him. Even with Jonghyun’s immediate response, _pity_ and _obligation_ have been going about his brain in a slow carousel.

“I’m serious,” Minho says. The tone in his voice is familiar, discordantly scolding and concerned. “You lived together for two, three years, and then just drop out of each other’s lives like -” he goes to snap his fingers, only connecting on the second time. “That’s abrupt, shit. He didn’t want to press you to keep in touch, but it hurts, you know? Shit hurts. Hurt, I guess.”

Jinki takes a drink of his beer. 

“He’s not really an exception,” he explains lamely. He wonders why Minho is treating him with aggressive sympathy, when Jinki is the one who twisted a spike into a loving relationship. “This is - new, for me. I don’t know.”

“I know,” Minho says. He holds his hands some middle distance apart, slowly inches them together, and then flings his arms wide, his left ending up dangling into the row behind them. He doesn’t bother to explain. “He knows. I think you know, somewhere, anyway. That people could care about you.”

He must catch Jinki’s expression.

“Sorry. That wasn’t my place,” he scrubs his hand through his hair. “I thought you should know where Jonghyun’s coming from, before you meet up after. You _are_ staying after, right?”

Jinki doesn’t have a response to that, and either Minho doesn’t notice, someone slamming into the seat beside him and rowdily hugging him, or he doesn’t think Jinki will answer him. He bites down hard on the barrage just unloaded into his body, and resorts to scanning the crowd for Taemin for a few minutes before the lights dim. A staff member comes out and announces Jonghyun Kim is up next.

He’s backed up by the house band, Jinki supposes, since he’s the only one announced. He has a guitar - “bass,” Minho advises without question, his conversational partner having exited with a buoyant double hop up the stairs - and it’s different than the one Jinki remembers seeing him lug in and out of the apartment. The mic gets adjusted lower by a stagehand, and she exchanges a few words that tease a faux-astonished look from Jonghyun. 

“Glad to see everybody out here tonight,” he says, clear and with a soft note to it. “Thank you for the organizers for putting this together, we couldn’t have done it without them -” he steps back to clap, starting a round of applause and whistling. As it goes on, he glances around the indoors, taking in the floor level, the winding, exposed staircases, the balcony where Minho and Jinki sit. 

His gaze stops briefly at Jinki, and his expression flickers as he nods, then he moves his gaze to the side. His face lights up, as brilliant as the stars. When Jinki looks to follow, he sees Minho glowing with affection, smiling widely back. 

“Alright, let’s go -” Jonghyun says, and then the drumbeat starts, the guitars kick in, and he begins singing. 

Jinki watches, but all that sticks in his mind is the parts where Jonghyun glances out into the crowd, soft fondness apparent in his eyes. He exchanges smiles when he can, but he always comes back to Minho, where the fondness changes over to tender affection. It’s so plain it makes Jinki want to writhe, like a leaf turning it on itself from being close to the fire. He wonders if they’ve always been able to do this, or if there was a time when Jonghyun measured out his glances, dissected his own instincts to keep himself from revealing too much - if Jinki is the only person who made him doubt and consider, even for a moment, that as an option.

Clearly, it doesn’t matter, if it ever did. Jonghyun’s lyrics are rife with references to men and women, to love being without exception. When he looks over the crowd, he sees an audience who appreciates and lives his words.

Here, Jinki’s the exception; Jinki is the person who holds himself back. 

When the set finishes, Minho stands up and whistles, yelling “ _Jonghyun is the best!_ ”, leaning forward over the railing as he puts his whole body into it. 

* * *

Jinki chivvies himself outside, aching for fresher air. The night has finally provided the coolness he had prepared for, so he shrugs his jacket on, shoving his hands into his pockets. He scrunches in on himself as he looks towards the front door.

After Jonghyun and the band had left the stage, and the audience began turning inwards, chatting, moving back towards the displays, Minho had grabbed his arm. 

“We’ll meet you outside, yeah? Your friend, too. Don’t leave yet, alright?”

Jinki had nodded in agreement, unable to think too long on the idea of Jonghyun tumbling outside, eager to find him, and not being there. Equally discomforting is the thought of continuing his and Minho’s conversation. 

He pushes himself onto one foot, then the next, concentrating on tracking the subtle changes in his posture, the grasping threads of his sense of balance to keep from falling over. A few groups disperse around him, chatting brightly about their plans.

“Hey, there you are - “ Taemin pops up at his side, his eyes luminous. “I didn’t expect you to wander off like that.”

“ _You_ wandered off,” Jinki says blankly back. There’s something off about him - his hair is awkwardly mussed, his face flushed, and, as Jinki examines him, he slides his hand down the side of his pants. It leaves behind an erratic swipe of glossiness. 

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, the pieces putting themselves together. 

“I still heard the music,” Taemin says indignantly. “Jonghyun’s songs are perfect for that. And I would have told you if you didn’t leave with that tall guy. Is that who you’re waiting for?”

“Yeah, I didn’t - I didn’t leave with him - he’s Jonghyun’s boyfriend. I just need to say goodbye - “

“Goodbye?” comes an easy voice. Jonghyun, tucked beneath Minho’s arm, emerges from behind an artist tugging their boxes along on a dolly. His beanie is pulled low, nearly to his eyebrows - the combination of this and the oversized sweater makes him look like nothing so much as a pile of blankets stood up, and little like a person who could command the attention of a crowd. Still, Jinki expects some exclamation from Taemin, given it was his push to come out tonight to see him, but the younger man is silent, pinkish color swimming unevenly up his throat.

“Jonghyun, hi,” Jinki says. He returns his ex-roommate’s offered hug quickly. “Good - good show. Really good.”

“Thanks,” he says brightly. He wiggles, in apparent, easy pleasure. “I heard Minho caught you just in time too. And I saw you just before we started, obviously….anyway, we’re about to go grab something to eat. I’m always starved afterwards, you know? There’s a really good place just around the corner, too - are you hungry?”

“Oh - oh,” Jinki says. He feels swarmed over, skin dotted with anxious, biting mites, but Jonghyun is expectant, and that makes it all the worse, the cringing realization of the disappointment he can’t help but bring about. 

His earlier energy having subsided, content to let Jonghyun chatter up until this point of pause, Minho squeezes at his boyfriend’s shoulder and steps forward. 

“Taemin, right?” he says unexpectedly. Without waiting for a response, he moves to the younger man’s side, wraps a friendly arm around his shoulder and begins walking. “Did you know the venue’s still open? And I know the bartender. You seem like someone who likes bad ideas - “

Jonghyun casts a look back over his shoulder, to watch the pair of them spear through the still exiting crowd. Jinki wonders if he could muster up the decisiveness to run. 

“So -”

“I’m sorry,” Jinki blurts out, unable to flee, and unable to defer. Even if Jonghyun has moved past the hurt Jinki’s put on him, he can’t, feeling the guilt burrow through his feet, into the concrete, locking him into place as he bleeds. 

He wants to continue, but anything further refuses to form in the space between them. 

“For what?” Jonghyun asks. 

“For -” he runs through everything that seems to have gone into this. He could start at the simplest, the most normalized: not making their shared apartment their shared home, for not engaging with Jonghyun even once in a while when he offered. He could fall on the unexploded grenade of his purposeful blindness to his and Minho’s relationship, and the repercussions of it. He could confess.

“For me,” he says. It captures it all, while admitting nothing, and it’s painful enough on its own to voice. 

He can’t look at Jonghyun for a long time. There’s gum, long blackened over from being tread on, a penny, shining on the concrete to occupy his gaze instead. He hears Jonghyun take in a long breath, and exhale it, purposefully steady.

“Could I have done anything differently?” he says finally, to Jinki’s complete bafflement. He can’t read his tone, the flat, resigned weight of it. He parts his lips in confusion, and Jonghyun drops his gaze for a moment, in his own attempt to collect himself. 

“Could I have done anything, to help you, when we were living together? So you didn’t end up - feeling like you couldn’t even talk to me -” he trails off, biting his lip. 

Jinki can think of a hundred things he could have done; he can’t think of anything for Jonghyun, who had the bad luck to split housing with someone like Jinki.

“We were just roommates,” Jinki says, when nothing else can come to his mind. He means: _roommates, despite your efforts; roommates, for as long as you could bear me_ , but in an instant he knows that’s not enough, the microcosm of hurt and disappointment that spasms across Jonghyun’s face. 

“Yeah - yeah,” Jonghyun says. He pats his hands against his hips, and half-pivots his body back towards the building, away from Jinki. He glances up at the clouds, looking for stars. 

“Take care of yourself, okay?” he says. He reaches up, adjusts his beanie so a few dark locks fall out, and leaves Jinki behind. 

Jinki thinks that’s the best choice he could make. 

* * *

Jinki leans against his car, a few blocks away, warming himself with a quick smoke, when Taemin lights up his phone with a text.

 _taetaetae_ : _drinking will get lyft_

When Jinki questions the plan - _are you sure?_ \- his coworker responds with some indecipherable code, soon after followed up with a more intelligible _ye_. He pulls the car door open and settles into the seat.

The hue of a red light cascades on the hood of the car ten minutes later. He grounds out the butt as time moves forward. 

A clinical thought wanders across his mind - was there a point where he could have prevented all of this? The hurt that he had caused people - at what junction of his life could he have changed himself? Would that person be able to nurture friendships, instead of splintering them at the base? And if he could be that person, would anxiety be someone else’s problem that he could sympathize with, but not know, personal and harsh, at the base of his being?

He was eleven, thirteen, nineteen, twenty-six, wrapping himself in thin excuses and pretending he could be happy, be confident, be _normal,_ when he can’t.

He is thirty, still doing so. 

He had a course of small, unconscious actions as the person he was stuck being, to help him deal with the daily anxiety of existing. Would those only grow, as the years went on? The three minor damages done to his body - was that him, finding another release because what he had was no longer sufficient? Was it his hand that had held the knife, let it slip and slide against his skin? It was his nail that broke against his sternum: did he take the ragged edge and dig it into the thin skin at the back of his neck? What would he do to himself, tomorrow?

He heaves a breath out. It’s irrelevant. He’s ending up in the same place tonight. Nothing has changed in himself; nothing can be changed in himself.

Another text lights up the screen, tilted from the phone’s placement into the cup holder.

 _taetaetae_ : _fk do i work tomorrow? hyung_

 _taetaetae_ : _hyuuuuuung_ _pls_

The vibrations keep coming on top of the previous one. 

If he takes the next turn, he can make a short loop, tell Taemin, and shut down as soon as he gets home. As far as he knows, Minho is with Taemin - and with Jonghyun. They’ll take care of him, far better than Jinki could.

_jinkil: i’m nearby. checking._

The response is a nonsequitur, but nothing else comes after: _fk me._

He keys into the back door, walking into the settling warmth of a kitchen turned off only a couple hours earlier. Jinki trods towards where the office is tucked behind the bathrooms, the door usually closed to protect from the clattering bustle. The taste of beer lingers awkwardly at the back of his tongue, improper in the place where Jinki is always, always sober. 

The papers scattered near the back flutter as he pulls open the office door, just close enough to see - _taemin lee_ , _2-10_ \- and he pulls out his phone to send the news. He winds his way to the closer front door without looking, knowing the pattern of tables to chairs, the ATM shoved near the cashier’s desk. 

When he pulls it open, across the street, Kibum is there, pulling a cigarette from his mouth. 

As though reenacting the few days prior, he tilts his head inquisitively towards Jinki. He follows the script, nods, and props the door open with his body. His heart clenches as Kibum approaches, as tight and as sharp as a fist preparing to strike. 

“Hi,” Kibum says, and moves to slide past Jinki into the cavernous, half-lit dark of the restaurant. He makes his way to table four, and when he slides in to sit, Jinki can’t help but follow, sliding in opposite of him. 

There’s a moment, and then laughter, a bubble of skepticism popping out of Jinki in disbelief. 

“What’s so funny?” Kibum asks, but he doesn’t need an answer, really. He’s already smiling, small, the rest of it held in reservation. 

“This whole night,” Jinki starts. He folds his hands together and pushes them under his chin. Each thought had stacked unsteadily in his mind; now, with a practical stranger as an audience without context, each starts its fall. They land clumsily on his tongue, tripping off of his lips.

“I took a coworker to a music show tonight. I shouldn’t have. He talked me into it, because the singer - I lived with him for a while. Roommates. But I - I could have been better to him, I treated him wrongly, and never really apologized for it - “ he can’t discuss the specifics, even with Kibum listening patiently, his shame delved in to deep to be dug up, “His boyfriend scolded me for not talking to him, even though, that’s what you would want. What I did - he shouldn’t want to talk to me. Neither should Minho - his boyfriend. I lost my coworker through all this. I think he was hooking up with someone, but I couldn’t - there was nowhere to be except there, hearing those things. And after he asked me to stay, because Jonghyun - his boyfriend, the guy I lived with - wanted to talk to me.”

“He wanted to know what _he_ could have done for me. What he could have done. He didn’t have anything to do. _I_ was the one in the wrong, I’m _still_ in the wrong. I said the wrong thing. I hurt him. I know I did. He left. It’s good that he did. He’s probably out with my coworker, all three of them, enjoying themselves because I’m not there. I don’t want to be there. I can’t. He asked me to check his schedule, that’s why I’m here. I can give that to him, and that’ll be all, he’ll stop texting me, I can cut it off and end this night. But now you’re here, and I can’t... I don’t want to anymore. Go home. Be alone. When you’re - “ he laughs again, shoulders shaking as every piece of feeling that’s been swarming inside of him like a hornet’s nest, they propel themselves out of his mouth. 

Kibum lets him laugh it out, and Jinki feels mildly hysterical, but he can’t stop until the last bit of it is done, one final giggle that leaps out to a quick death. 

“Have you ever wished you were -” he falters. “Anywhere else?”. 

“Somewhere, or someone?” Kibum asks, knowingly. 

“Does it matter?” Jinki responds. 

“Yeah,” Kibum says without hesitation. He reaches up to pluck one of the candles from a nearby shelf, blows the dust off of its wick. He opens his hand up and gestures towards Jinki. It takes a moment for him to find and hand over his lighter, and another moment for Kibum to produce a flicker and put it to the wick. He then pulls a pair of chopsticks out of their paper sleeve, and breaks them apart. One he puts to his side, and the other he lays across the glass rim of the candle, the flame flickering hungry beneath it.

“They’re the same, right?” he asks. Jinki nods, and Kibum continues. “I took them from the same packet. They’re made the same way. Everything about them is identical. So - is one better than the other? Would the one here -” he prods at the one lying on the table. “- do any better against the fire? Or did I just fuck over this one arbitrarily?”

Jinki looks at the candle, the darkening grain.

Kibum doesn’t wait for Jinki to respond; he lets the candle burn on, and digs into his own pocket. 

He pulls out a knife. Jinki has a brief flash, the mirage of Kibum pointing a knife at him, feet away, and this one is real, if only for a moment: he lays it down on the table too. Kibum purposefully sits back, keeping their space separate, and his voice level.

“No one is the same, but who you are does nothing to earn what life does to you, good or bad. Say someone came into this restaurant right now, with a knife like that. They hold it to your throat. They pull it across.” He jerks his head back in a sudden, jarring impression. “They kill you, and they let me go. If they switched our places - would I have done any better? Wouldn’t the knife cut me just as much? Wouldn’t I die too? And nothing about that would be fair, or earned.”

There isn’t anything Jinki can say to that. 

“Anyway,” Kibum breaks the spell, folds the knife back up. The light in his eyes, something brilliant and wild, dims as soon as the metal is folded away. He leaves it on the table, and spins it lazily at the tip of his finger. “That was probably more than you wanted to get. My point is - we can’t help what life does to us. Some of us get fucked over, and there’s no reason for it. Nothing we did drew it to us, or invited it in. We have to live in spite of life.”

Jinki searches for the words that have to come after that.

“It’s okay,” Jinki says with hesitation. Kibum doesn’t seem to need reassurance. It’s his own heart that is beating a frantic tempo, unsure if he is afraid or enlivened by Kibum’s passion. The other man is simply looking at him, for a long, heavy moment before he speaks further.

“Tonight, it is,” Kibum corrects. He smiles a little, something small and sweet that aches. “Tomorrow it could be okay, too. That’s for tomorrow.”

He stands up, holding his hand out for Jinki to take, and he can see in a moment where this is going. His heart is still undecided, but he allows himself to be pulled up, allows himself to be pulled away from the windows and into the back walkway towards the kitchen. 

In the stillness, Kibum lifts a hand to Jinki’s cheek and kisses him.

* * *

He thinks first of Hyeyoung, of how unfitting it was despite his efforts. He thinks second, of the videos, their distant performance he observed safely from his bedroom, put away as soon as they served their purpose. He can think even of the men he’s found attractive. They rustle up with little effort, eager to be remembered in the opening this moment provides. Each has their own small, half-formed fantasy. 

They are like flickering, dying bulbs, compared to the sun that is Kibum, kissing him now. The press of his lips against Jinki’s is right; the barest opening of his mouth is a sweet invitation waiting for Jinki to accept. And he does - he can’t find it in himself to issue any objection, when Kibum pulls him forward, asking for more - not when Jinki has just started to taste him. 

His hand, his body, is pressed against Jinki as they back up into the wall. There’s a kind of gentle propulsion in Kibum’s touch, giving Jinki the previously-unknown courage to find the small curve of Kibum’s hip, to perch his hand there. He hears more than he feels his own responsiveness, as though he is stationed around the corner, eavesdropping hungrily. 

He kisses in fumbling, nervous motions, bumping his head against Kibum’s ineptly. 

But Kibum moves with easy expectations. He catches Jinki’s hand as it trembles upwards and places it against the back of his neck as their lips meet again. Jinki’s grip is loose; it tightens for a moment only as Kibum lets his teeth catch against Jinki’s lip, before he realizes and apologizes - “Sorry, I didn’t mean to - ”

“Shh,” Kibum says. “You didn’t hurt me. You didn’t.”

He pauses for a moment instead of moving back, and brings his hands up to each of Jinki’s cheeks. Time swells to a stop; Kibum holds it in place as he breathes out: 

“You can’t hurt me. I promise.”

“Okay,” Jinki says back, breathless and unable to summon up the argument. Kibum has moved to kiss him again; he catches Jinki’s next “okay” on his tongue. 

Kibum slides to the side, moving his attention to the line of Jinki’s jaw, willing Jinki to dip his head down, so Kibum can press a kiss beneath his ear. The subtle exhalation of his breath tickles at the fine hairs. Above this, there is the squeaky noise of his shoes against the floor; they shuffle as Kibum draws their bodies closer together. It seems like their embrace won’t ever end, like it couldn’t, an ouroboros slithering upon the tile. 

Kibum is letting out little sounds of pleasure. Jinki is struck dumb when the first one brushes across his ear, followed by another, promising more to come. It invites him to release his own, whether it’s a sigh or a moan, to let Kibum have the simple satisfaction to hear his reciprocity. 

There is a wary caution brimming in him, that keeps him from giving over entirely. Even with his body pressed up against Kibum, it’s altogether unreal to this part of Jinki that has never planned for a life that lets him have this. It insists it isn’t true - that the friction of Kibum moving against him is imagined, that the fine hairs folding beneath Jinki’s exploring touch is a delusion, that there is no world where a man is both wanted by Jinki, and wants Jinki back. 

Paranoia, is the better word for it, and it stands around the corner listening in, and it peeks around the corner because it has to see for itself. This, he thinks dazedly, this will satisfy the doubt, the suspicious hunger, that’s lived in him for years. He can know, and he can change - if Kibum can touch him so freely then there is nothing wrong with him that cannot be fixed, all he has to do is _look_ and there will be his proof, his permission, to be someone else:

He looks, and there he finds: 

Kibum hooking his thumb beneath the waist of Jinki’s pants, the coldness of his ring raising goosebumps on pale, hidden skin -

Jinki’s eyes darkening, succumbing to what he still can’t name - 

The intersection of neck and collarbone, Kibum’s lips opening and his tongue licking out - 

Kibum moves, and his cock presses at the softness of Jinki’s thighs.

* * *

He can feel Kibum’s heart beat beneath his hand. That’s not right at all.

After all - he can feel Kibum’s hip beneath his palm; his thumb brushing against the press of bone beneath skin. He still lays his hand, awestruck, at the back of Kibum’s neck, balanced atop the soft fuzz of hair, moving gently with every dip and turn in their interlude. 

There is blood pressing against his flattened palm. It is urgent in its pulse; it has a petition to be spilled. 

His eyes yet closed, Jinki sees.

There is neon, and there is black; within it is Kibum, waiting. 

He knows - he _knows_ \- 

It comes back to him, his dream solidified with sharpened claws. There is Kibum, slicing his own chest open; there is Kibum, not letting Jinki look away. There is Kibum, expectant for an answer. 

He cannot give one, he does not know the question. He is struck dumb here too, not at the intimate intrusions Kibum was perpetuating, but rather the blood, hot, against his palm. It forms shallow pools in the furrows of Jinki’s fingers; they quiver and release into rivulets running down the back of his hand. It collects into a stain; it proliferates, tattooed in bright, unreal red, across his skin. 

It cannot be dismissed, hidden away, bandaged into healing.

Nothing can be hidden, all is exposed, in this emptiness. There is only a soft, encroaching neon light over him and Kibum, serving as a spotlight of their closeness, the knowing pressure of Jinki’s hand against his chest, the way Kibum’s eyes never leave his, the way their breath mixes together, impossible to separate - 

* * *

He slams back into himself, Kibum’s arms around him, Jinki’s shirt clenched in his hand. He recoils, with Kibum left in his wake. Jinki’s shadow lays briefly on his chest like a sleeping lover. He places himself as far away as he can get, against the opposite wall. 

Kibum takes a half-step forward. His head ducks down, seeking to catch Jinki’s wandering, anxious eyeline. Leaning in closer, he lifts a tentative hand that hovers just above Jinki’s collar. Sweat beads out in its shade. 

“Jinki -” he says. Jinki flicks his eyes up at the call before they plummet back down. The receding wave of pleasure is sour in his throat. His chest heaves with exertion, as he tries to squeeze the lid shut, when it’s filled so close to bursting. 

He’s sorry. It’s not Kibum’s fault. It’s a petty offering, but even it won’t permit itself to be spoken.

 _Coward_ , Kibum doesn’t say. Jinki reads it in the plain silence. His hand won’t land now, when just moments ago, he held Jinki like a precious gift. He has already formed inside an awareness, an insight that must bear out earned condescension. It must be ripening on his tongue, ready to fall off the lush vine of his lips. 

“I’m going to leave,” Kibum says shortly, matter of fact. Jinki barely hears it at first, then it lands, hot and inevitable. Of course he is leaving - what other decision would be rational, in the light of Jinki’s behavior? In light of Jinki’s entire, failed self? 

He has held back on further judgment; it’s a mercy Jinki doesn’t think he’s earned. Without this expectation, he can feel himself falling back into an awareness permeated with copper, blood warm between his fingers, thick in the air. When he succumbs to its pressure, it distills Jinki into a reassuring nothing.

But - then there are whispers of Kibum’s movement: the creak of the back door being pushed aside, the brushing against the plants littering the entryway, and then the bell above the front door. It constructs Jinki once more into a person. 

“Wait,” he says to himself, and then - “Wait, Kibum - !”

He bolts to the front, nearly tripping over the floor mat and catching himself several feet later, palms slamming into the door frame. Kibum is just outside. 

“Kibum - “ he says, plaintive and unsure. 

The other man turns to look at him. His shirt is still pushed to the side from Jinki’s hands. His lips are shining and wet from where they met Jinki’s. He waits for Jinki to say anything, when there is nothing in him willing to be admitted.

He can’t bear to watch Kibum walk away, not casting a second glance back. He drops his head forward into the glass. 

When he pulls away, there’s a smear of blood, a wound above his eyebrow. His skin breaks apart beneath a further, probing touch.

* * *

He stays there longer than he should, with a hope he shouldn’t bother holding - that there will be a knock on the door, a rapping against the glass, and Kibum will return, the evening will rewind, the words rolled back into his throat, the actions never taken. 

When he gives in and finally turns away, he finds himself sliding once more into table 4. The knife and the candle still sit where Kibum had arranged them. The chopstick has collapsed into two pieces, sinking into the melted wax. 

He stares. The candle he can place back, he can throw away the broken wood, but the knife - he can’t bear the thought of leaving it here, for someone else to pocket, someone who hasn’t heard him speak, or seen him so forcefully exist. He can’t throw it away either. 

He reaches out to touch it cautiously, as though it would leap away from him in revulsion, before closing his fingers around. 

It doesn’t feel right for him to have either, but Kibum isn’t coming back. He picks it up and heads for the back exit. 

The coldness of the knife against his palm reminded him of Kibum’s ring against his skin; the pressure of it against his thigh reminds him of the last heady sensation, before he broke what could have been.

* * *

His bed feels emptier than normal when he lays in it. He casts his eyes up, helpless in insomnia. He had tried to shower, brushed his teeth to evict the taste of beer still lingering, tossed his body in front of the TV, fiddled with his phone. There was nothing, though: not a single thing was able to stop his thoughts from turning back to Kibum, gawking at the wreckage he had formed singlehandedly. 

The only remnant outside of Jinki, the single memento - now that he was washed and scrubbed, the intoxicating scent and taste and touch of Kibum excised - sits innocuously at his bedstand. 

It’s wrong to keep it there, like he had stolen a piece of Kibum and it lurked around the edges of his bed, trapped. 

(His heart cringes at the thought when he turns to look at it - the real Kibum could have been here, maybe, if Jinki was a different person entirely, amused and warm in an afterglow. His lips could have danced across Jinki’s naked shoulder, his arm slung around him possessively.)

It was a different reality of two hours ago - when Kibum had left it behind, confident in what would come when he kissed Jinki. He had expected to come back to it, to stow it away securely once more. Jinki wondered if he had noticed it was gone; if his eyes had hardened and he gave it up as a reasonable cost for escaping him. 

He had promised Jinki he couldn’t hurt him - he had trusted him. 

It was a mistake, a presumption he had been able to make because he didn’t know Jinki at all. All he seems able to do is hurt people.

He reaches out recklessly, suddenly wanting to touch it, as though in doing so he could feel Kibum again. When he flicks the blade open, he drops it immediately, half-shivering at the feeling elicited. He sits, staring, before closing his hand around it again and cupping it against his chest like a token.

There was such a tempo of excitement and fear, when he had watched Kibum speak. He is mired in loathing for himself, but what he holds in his hand now thrums eagerly against his heart. It stokes at the buried embers of pleasure, as they are half-extinguished from guilt, until they start sparking again. 

The blood beneath his hand, the naked contact and intimate touch, the fire in Kibum’s eyes: they coalesce together into eager, confused desire.

If he had asked, would Kibum have pressed the knife against his skin - would he have held his breath, tremulous as a bird stepping from the nest - 

It has a flat, naked length - if he had pressed it against his sternum, the tip of it sharpened so keen that the merest adjustment, the lightest twist - would a dark red dot boil to the surface and pop?

Would it have given Jinki pleasure?

Would that have given Kibum pleasure? 

A harrowed breath gulps out of him. His cock is twitching, revived and parched for attention. A yellow street light drenches the room in ochre.

Slowly, inelegantly, he shucks his underwear off. He sits cross-legged, bare but for a light shirt and socks. He takes himself in hand, half-closes his eyes, and holds his breath for the plunge. 

Where would this begin? What image could he summon to capture the intimation of controlled, loving violence that could be acted upon his ordinary, average self? What was the root of it all?

There are two thoughts. The first: a small patch of sidewalk, styrofoam balanced on his legs, a knife extended through tobacco smoke. The second: an invocation declared across wood grain, candlelight flickering, his heart palpitating eagerly. Both of them pain him, too easily tainted.

Neither of them are right, really. When he moves them aside in his mind, he finds a dark haze lurking behind, overpowering and true: 

A neon-lit space in the middle of darkness - the man who became Kibum digs into his own chest with a shining, short blade. He carves himself into something new. The letters he makes, they bleed trails that pause in the shallow crease of his stomach, before moving on - creeping intimately beneath his clothes. 

Another haggard breath rips out of Jinki.

And what then? The blood would divert, slowed by the scattered field of coarse hair. If Kibum reached out, and took himself in hand, the blood would smear messily and coat the dusty protrusion of his cock. 

Where would Jinki be in all of this, but where he has found himself before, opposite, watching, silent? His own chest would be uncarved, but he has some offerings - a crooked creek from his thumb; a stream from the slope of his neck; an uneven marsh against his forehead. Kibum would see them for what they were, pale impressions. 

If Kibum knew so well his own flesh, to precisely measure it out to meet his own ends - if he could recognize where to take the first cut, design its equally winding and angled path, name the final stop - couldn’t he do the same for Jinki, as poor a comparison as he was? 

Couldn’t his hand hold that same blade to Jinki’s chest just so - the sternum, where his heart beat, chaotic and pathetic? Would he not give him relief?

Would he at least let Jinki kneel before him, beggar-poor, and let him watch Kibum’s mastery?

In the reality of his bedroom, Jinki doesn’t grab for the knife. He doesn’t imitate the deed and spill blood. He circles his hand loosely around his cock and pumps from the fantasy of it, the utter submission and confession. 

His eyes close as he goes faster, the shape of the knife already committed to memory.

The Kibum he imagines is soft at heart, forgiving - the application of the blade to skin is intentional and firm. There is only precision that does not have room for cruel enjoyment or extreme pain. He is knowing and authoritative in the shallow lines he traces.

Jinki chokes out. His grip slips over the head of his cock. An idea spills over him when teeth gnash over his lip. He quickly drags the few flakes of dead skin away until the smallest hint of copper touches his tongue. 

As a solace, pitiable as it is, it works. The bare metallic flavor of it, the whispered fantasy of Kibum’s skill in drawing blood - they fall together like a long-awaited reunion. He is coming closer to the end.

There is room for one final image - the tip of the blade, circling each sensitive bud of his nipple, paired with Kibum’s contemplative glance upward at Jinki, who was cut open by Kibum’s mere presence long before the knife ever met his skin.

He comes with a gasp, white spilling over his hand. When he opens his eyes, the knife sits just out of reach, harmless and cold.

* * *

It’s a few days later that Taemin corners him at work, with an almost unrecognizably sheepish look on his face. Even with intersecting schedules, Jinki has been taking pains to avoid the younger man as much as he can. He doesn’t want to hear anything about what Taemin was doing while he sat at the restaurant with Kibum, and even less so about after, in the privacy of his bedroom. 

It’s difficult to maintain that distance, when he’s shaking his hands dry coming out of the bathroom. Taemin has planted himself in the door frame. 

“Just a minute - not even a minute - ”

“I’m not interested in going out, Taemin,” he says wearily. “I don’t even know when his shows are -” The other man interrupts him, shaking his head haphazardly. It makes his own neck ache. 

“I’m saying sorry. That guy - Minho - he’s been harassing me all week to stop being, and I quote, a ‘bratty dick’, to you and making you uncomfortable.”

He pulls out his phone, shows an array of text messages sent from the night in question, to just the previous night. There’s glimpses Jinki manages to catch: _you’re being a shit_ \- _just say you’re sorry_ \- _he’s a good guy_

“What did he tell you?” Jinki asks. His tone is carefully neutral. After all, he doesn’t know how long Taemin stayed with Minho at the venue. Jonghyun would have gone inside to join them, perhaps. Friends drink, friends pour out stories. 

Taemin shrugs. 

“Fuck if I know. I was drunk, obviously. He dragged me to the bar and pounded, like, five shots, and then said I couldn’t do it, so I had to prove him wrong - and he took my phone, or I gave him my phone, or Jonghyun, maybe - he has my number and instead of sending me _normal shit_ , he sent me an actual fucking essay on respecting your elders and not leaving them as soon as they got you in the door and being respectful of other people’s time and schedules and - _shit_ \- how’d he put it - ”

“I didn’t ask him to say anything,” Jinki says. He almost wants to smile, for the first time in days - since Kibum kissed him, petal-soft and cold as snow - at his coworker’s disgruntlement. 

Taemin heaves out a dramatic sigh. 

“He didn’t listen to me. I _did_ look for you. I just misplace stuff all the time. So now I’m apologizing because now he’s being the dick. ”

“Are you - are you calling me ‘stuff’?”

“All humans are stuff,” Taemin says sincerely. “Do you forgive me? Will you get your friends off my back?”

“They’re not my friends,” Jinki protests. The quiet amusement stifles down as he realizes Taemin has spent more time with Minho than Jinki ever had and Jonghyun - Jonghyun always made friends easily, and kept them even easier. Since he was there, he considers Taemin a friend now, what Jinki never managed.

Taemin shrugs, discarding the objection. 

“Yeah, well, they’re not my parents either, but - apology accepted? Feels like a yes.”

Jinki dips his head into a single nod, and Taemin nods along with him, grin splitting his face. He walks off, texting with an air of self-satisfaction. 

His stomach churns ponderously, as Jinki considers the last message, the date on it so recent. The message doesn’t make sense at all.

_he’s a good guy_

* * *

It interrupts the spiral that has propelled him from day to day. The thought of Minho writing that to Taemin makes no sense without Jonghyun, leaning against his shoulder, nodding along in support. It is the only way he can picture it happening. Jonghyun, who walked away and asked Jinki to take care of himself; Minho, who asked Jinki to believe that others cared about him. They both made a statement that demands clarification, the opportunity to refute.

He never got Minho’s number. The last message from Jonghyun stares up at him as he swallows down the last of his drink, his face twisting at the bitterness. 

_jongd: sorry i can’t meet you!! busy setting up. minho on his way. where are you waiting?_

He writes a series of messages, tucking himself into the corner of his couch as the alcohol soaks into him. Some of them lunge out, vomit-fast. Some are slow constructions that lumber into an uneasy existence. 

_jinkil: taemin apologized. he said it was because of minho, but i felt like it couldn’t just be him. you didn’t have to do that, but i appreciate it._

_jinkil: he did call me stuff, though._

_jinkil: i made bad decisions when we lived together. it doesn’t matter why when i know it ultimately hurt you. i knew i hurt you then too and didnt say anything. i know that made it worse. i’m sorry then and i’m sorry now._

_jinkil: i’ll be sorry tomorrow too_

_jinkil: minho said that i hurt you by leaving you alone when you moved out. that night before the show started right before you looked up at us. but i hurt you before, right? how can i hurt you by being there, and by leaving? one of them has to be right_

_jinkil: right? if it is both it’s just me_

His eyes stay on the last line, the discussion of being someone else, anywhere else; the utter refusal in Kibum’s voice at the suggestion. The person he could have been -

_jinkil: i could have said hi that morning. but you were happy_

_jinkil: both of you. and you still are. its so obvious and i want you to be_

_jinkil: that’s why i need to not be there. you were filled up with happiness just looking at him._

_jinkil: you know what you want and you aren’t afraid. i don’t understand. i can’t undo anything that made this whole mess. i can’t undo me._

He erases each and every one before he can muster up the recklessness to send it. He pauses at the first two, and the last one. 

The former feels like what would be expected of him. He can make a joke, maybe make him smile a little, and extend his gratitude as stilted as it seems. That would be enough. 

The last feels the truest, but it’s so close to what he’s already said, after the show. He already knows that’s not what he should say to Jonghyun - he can still see the spasm of hurt fireworking over his all too open face, inexplicably affected by Jinki’s earned self-deprecation.

He deletes them too. He goes to bed and tosses, restless, until he reaches out to touch the knife, to feel the memory of Kibum’s warmth for a moment beneath his fingers.

* * *

It’s almost normal, what the next few days bring. Kibum doesn’t show up at the restaurant, fingers twitching over his phone, inhaling with pleasure the _boricha_. 

(He even stops appearing out of the corner of Jinki’s eyes, when he walks outside, when he turns to assess the dining room.)

Taemin doesn’t invite him out, nor make mention of Minho or Jonghyun. His phone brings no more messages of outreach. He doesn’t write messages he has no intention of sending. 

He works, and he goes home. He calls his parents and checks in on them and their pleasing retirement. 

The _almost_ : instead of clicking through tabs on restless nights, or drowsy mornings, he takes care to arrange Kibum’s knife in a place he can see it - or, later, feel it - before he starts to touch himself.

Each new positioning finds it coming gradually closer. It emigrates from the center of his bedstand, to the edge of it (where the blade juts out, stretching over the gap between the stand and the mattress. If Jinki had slept afterwards, and rolled over, it would have stabbed him in the shoulder.), to the foot of his bed (just within reach of his toe if he stretched), to be pressed against his outer thigh, held in his left hand, inviting danger if he moved too wildly as he came. 

In a matched rhythm to these movements, the Kibum he greets in his fantasies feels increasingly less like a dream. It is an absurd, disquieting idea: that Kibum’s presence in them is the result of Kibum’s choice. And yet - when Jinki reaches out to dot his fingers in Kibum’s blood - when Kibum moves to touch him back - he is making the intelligent decision to do so. 

It provokes willful ignorance on Jinki’s part, helped by the fact that it changes nothing. Kibum never stops Jinki from touching him, nor does he hesitate to handle the knife against his skin. The fantasy always concludes, the blood always spills.

When he comes for the first time holding the knife, he holds himself too tight and coiled for possible harm. It proved a straining, painful effort to keep still and safe from himself. 

But - the pleasure had nearly blinded him when it arrived. He knew he’d do it again without question, eager to see Kibum again, to feel the softness of his touch, and the sharpness of metal teeth.

* * *

The summer is drawing to a close, and with it the apex of heat breaks one day. Jinki sleeps long and well a cool night soon after, dreaming without claws or blood or desire. 

When he wakes up and spies the knife on his bedstand, it awakens nothing within him but near-whimsical consideration.

How conventional could its presence have been, without changing anything in this moment? Kibum could have been in the shower, his clothes tucked away in a drawer he’s slowly taking over. He could come back out, pull jeans up and over and clip the knife to the customary place in his pocket. His figure could lean over the bed, bestowing a smile at Jinki as he fought to blink sleep out of his eyes, eager for the first clear sight of the day to be Kibum.

He reaches over to grab at his phone, his thumb hitting the messaging app. The whimsical consideration dips into delusion, long enough for him to type something that could have been ordinary, if only he were someone else. 

_jinkil: i met someone a few weeks ago. you’d like him._

He looks up after finishing it. There’s nothing else in his room, there never has been. The phone feels heavy in his hands; the unsent, wishful message makes up the majority of the weight.

_jinkil: you have something in common i made mistakes with him too._

He can stand looking at the pair of messages for about twenty seconds before tearing the fantasy down. It detonates beneath his touch in pieces, starting with _him_. 

* * *

That night, he delicately lays the knife on his stomach. It points upwards at his chin. 

He knows it by heart, now, the very shape and weight of it: there’s the protruding curve of the switch, the half-circle forming the base. It glints differently according to the kind of light in his apartment, from the shimmering yellow of the bedside, to the fluorescence of the ceiling light. 

He tenses up instinctively as the blade unfolds beneath his touch. His cock twitches at the coolness of it ghosting across his chest. 

A mole dots the space just above its point like an exclamation. 

It was once so unfamiliar, the press of it against his hand, but the simple, subtle balance of it on his abdomen now is as natural as breathing. He inhales deeply, and then expels, the knife teetering under his watchful eye.

The pleasure will burst out of him - it’s certain. It will leave him cavernous and vacant for shame to take root. 

The feeling is right. Jinki had torn him and Kibum apart, and spurred the other man to walk away. Jinki chooses to use the knife he left behind, increasingly shameless and desperate to grasp the tendrils of lost pleasure. 

He can’t stop, despite the ugliness of it all. His eyes skip over old favorites, and new appeals, as he tries and fails to satisfy himself. They leave him soft, unmotivated. There is no comparison. 

That isn’t to say he doesn’t try. He does. They are painful, queasy experiences, cousins to his ill-guided attempt with Hyeyoung. In every step of the doing, he wants to rip himself open, and let the lashing nausea within tumble out - but he doesn’t. Instead, he jerks himself off to completion, and he cleans up.

When he washes his face, he examines carefully the reflection in the mirror: here, the lifeless eyes are noted, their flickering a mere cadaver spasm of movement.

So, here he is again, clinging to the only thing he has left, like the survivor of a great disaster: 

The knife waits for his thoughts to settle, nestled in the light tangle of hair that surrounds his bellybutton. Resigning himself to it, Jinki turns his mind inward, like a hound to the scent, uncovering the secluded space within his imagination. Within it, there is Kibum, his pale chest opened with perpetually fresh wounds. There is no deviation: there is no other path he can take, when he fixes on the knife, except the one that has Kibum as its ultimate end. The man in question searches over Jinki as he arrives, eyeing him with deliberate, knowing intent. Jinki kneels in front of him. The knife extends from Kibum’s hand like an offering. 

Even as other means lose their effect on him, the repetitious motions here have yet to lose their thrill. There is no heightening intensity in the cuts given; they are always the same, always issued by Kibum’s knowing hand, the perfect slice of pain that leaves him panting in pleasure. The only thing, perhaps, that changes is Jinki: how he approaches Kibum eagerly, how accepting he is of the odd space they inhibit, how he doesn’t shy away from the bare skin. There is nothing but utter trust in this space - he trusts Kibum to use his body, as he sees fit, to draw from it only the blood necessary.

The first cut traces shallowly down his deltoid. In his bedroom, Jinki carefully begins moving his hand up and down his length. He holds his torso as still as he can; the joint of the knife lies at the soft ripple of his abdominals.

Relentlessly, the knife moves on under Kibum’s direction. Every place it touches suffers and succumbs to its gentle pressure, sundering itself for pleasure. Jinki can only watch Kibum at the sharpest moments, to look for what lurks, unspoken, in his eyes as he takes Jinki apart. 

In his bedroom, his cock is slickening wet, and Jinki moves to adjust himself for comfort. The knife is knocked sideways; he straightens it hastily, higher than it was, balanced on the arrowhead end of his sternum. 

Jinki wonders at how this is - how each repetition of this time together feels as necessary, as hungry, as the first. How much of himself could be carved apart, before what remained lost the ability to feel pleasure? What was it here, that made it so easy, to be so reckless? 

Kibum has finished the line he draws beneath Jinki’s ribs. Blood drips at either end, at the deepest parts, as he sits back to look at his work. 

As if brooding on the design, Kibum places the knife at the centerpoint of the fresh line, a micrometer length of the knife into the wound that he now draws up. He stops the movement at the breastbone, and pirouettes the knife as he contemplates. 

Jinki breathes, careful and shallow. Any deeper and he would pierce himself. Their figures wrap together in glass-spun silence. 

When he speaks, Kibum’s words shatter it:

_“Have you done this for me?”_

He tightens the grip; the blade flies upward in the interrogative. The trajectory is direct and Jinki must throw his body backwards to spare himself. Blood spills for the first time on his face, hot on his tongue. Kibum looms above him, having finally given voice to the question that had lived silent, unseen in this space with them. 

Kibum blocks out everything else: his heaving, scarring chest, the bloody knife in his hand. It’s too much for Jinki, and his eyes begin to roll back. Kibum - everything - disappears from his perception, and he is rendered senseless as his orgasm comes.

In his bedroom, he bucks forward. 

He has forgotten the knife. It pushes into him. The silver shines thinly through the skin it has slid beneath. 

Jinki stares at it, choking down shock, arousal, and pain. He doesn’t dare to breathe, his lungs held tight in agony; his cock pulses one last issue as he waits for - 

There is nothing, no one, to wait for. He is alone. 

With this realization, he wills himself to begin moving. 

He goes first to take the knife out the way it came, but the entrance is too fragile to be reused. At his exploratory touch, a small rose petal of skin falls open; the knife drops, heavy and free, to the junction of his thigh and torso. He twists away from it, panic rising like the tide.

As he walks to the bathroom, he tries not to look down. He takes a towel and presses it against the wound. Beneath the sink, he rummages to find rubbing alcohol. 

When he stands, anxious breaths jolting through his body, the mirror catches his attention. In a moment - in a lifetime - a light dances strangely in his eyes, as the red stain seeps between his fingers. 

He looks away. He covers the open bottle with the towel, flips it over, and presses the damp spot against his chest without hesitation. The yelp of pain echoes against the tiles.

* * *

“You’ve got a visitor,” says one of the waitresses, ducking into the back and yelling over the sound of water running. Jinki nearly drops the dishes. 

He slides his hands over his apron, to dry them off, as she disappears back to the front. It seems impossible for Kibum to have come back, but it’s unlikely to be anyone else at all. The bandage at the center of his chest scratches against his shirt.

His brain whispers - _unless_ \- as he steps out, and Jonghyun raises a hand to greet him, squeezed to the side of the entryway, visibly taking care not to block anyone coming in or going out. 

Jinki comes to a dead stop.

“Can we talk?” Jonghyun says, leaning forward as though anyone’s listening.

“I don’t have much time, “ Jinki says. His hand moves to his pocket, as though the messages he had never sent could float out and be read in the air between them. 

Jonghyun shakes his head. His expression placates even as he resists the attempt to stall. 

“It won’t be long.”

He turns half towards the door, but doesn’t look until Jinki relents and moves to join him. Only once Jinki is fully outside, and meeting his gaze, does he start speaking. 

“I know you don’t want to talk about this. I’m sorry to approach you at work, but I think - I hope not - but I think things have gotten worse since we last talked.”

He pauses, as if to let him object. Jinki breathes out and gives a tiny, affirming nod.

“I don’t need anything back from you. You don’t owe me anything. I’ve been trying to figure out how we can talk in a way that’ll help, because leaving it as it is, that’s not an option, not if you’re worse off than you were.”

Jonghyun puts his shoulders back, and straightens. 

“You did something shitty to me - to me and Minho - once. It was wrong of you, and I was angry. But I don’t hate you, and I never have. I - both of us - we’re more worried about you than anything. Have been for a long time, longer than I think you’d realize.”

“Jinki - you never seemed to be feeling… _anything_ . All you did - all you _do_ \- is work and stay at home. And maybe that could be enough, but it doesn’t seem like it was, or like it is. It’s like you’re in this haze that keeps you numb. The only time you seemed different - well, was when you found out about me and Minho and I made you talk about it. That was the most I’d ever seen from you. And I know you were lying.”

Jinki looks away at that, and he can see from the corner of his eye Jonghyun’s hand reaching out, and withdrawing.

“About being okay, I mean. You looked - _lost_. Like you had been in this haze, and when you came out you didn’t know what was around you in your own life.” 

“Seeing me and Minho, I get this feeling that it was more than just that it was two guys. I mean, that was part of it, but, um, that we had been together for months at that point, and I never hid it from you. But you never noticed, and seeing us made you short out trying to figure out what you blinded yourself on.” 

“And then - when we met up again - when nothing seemed to have changed, it must have been something else, right? I’ve been trying to figure it out, because it wasn’t like the first time, finding out. I think - I think you’re surprised that we were still together, and still happy, when you aren’t. And that was just as hard to see.” 

“I just want you to know,” Jonghyun says steadily. “That if you need anything, that you can talk to me about it. I don’t care that we didn’t when we lived together, and I don’t want you to feel bad about it either. You don’t have to talk to me now at all. But you should feel like having a friend is an option in your life, and that I’m - I’m available to be that option.”

He finally stops, and looks away from Jinki to give him a moment.

People walk past them, going about their lives. Jinki can still see the burn mark in the wall from Kibum’s cigarette. 

“Thank you,” he says. “For caring.”

Jonghyun looks startled, but bites down on asking further. Hope is near visible, floating from his hands, his face, for Jinki to continue. 

“About me - _it_ ,” he adds uncomfortably. If he doesn’t name _it_ , he can pretend it’s a simple matter of personality clashes, of values and expectations. 

“Thanks for taking care of Taemin, too,” he says, seizing onto another thread. “He texted me, later. That’s why I didn’t pick him up when you were all done.”

“Don’t worry about it. We got him tucked into a rideshare and apologized to the driver in advance - he was talking a lot of shit for someone who couldn’t buckle his own seatbelt. But he’s a good kid.” At Jinki’s look, Jonghyun changes his tone from fondness to amused indignation. “He’s capable of being a good kid.”

“He said Minho called him a bratty dick.”

“People are complicated,” he says, laughing, and for a moment Jinki laughs too, and his heart clenches at the simple pleasure of shared amusement. Jonghyun clears his throat and glances inside the window facing them.

“Your manager is giving me some evil eye. I think he’ll come after me if I keep you any longer...” Jonghyun says. He clears his throat; and his smile is a shy curve that dares to press its luck. “I’ve already talked so much. I’ll stop. You should just - find something that makes you feel genuine. Right in yourself. You should be able to know and hold onto those things.”

“I get it,” he says, thinking of Kibum, sitting across from him, embracing him; then, the knife, a black hole in the already shuttered universe of his life.

“Yeah?” Jonghyun says. He still hasn’t moved to leave, despite the insistent, summoning tapping against the window.

“Yeah.” There’s the faintest memory of a taste, and the ghost coldness of a ring against his hipbone. Fresher than this, though, is the pink, warning petal he has hidden beneath his shirt, and the wrong light in his eyes he searches for in the mirror each morning.

“Thank you.”

* * *

At home, he tugs his shirt off and drops it onto the couch without looking. The bandage on his chest pulls at the motion, causing him to scratch at it with annoyance, and growing discomfort. 

He could find the knife with his eyes closed, but he approaches it clear-eyed and purposeful. It sits on his bedstand, waiting for him to use it again. With a care he hasn’t practiced in weeks, he unfolds it and sits to examine its unremarkable edge, its plain handle. The tip betrays no sign of its furrow beneath his skin. It should be ordinary, and yet - 

He forces it closed. His chest pangs in the doing, like he’s closing a door through which his name is called. 

After speaking to Jonghyun, it’s easier to name the knife for what it is: a danger. Even after he had slid it beneath his skin - even though he hasn’t touched it in days, and with that hasn’t touched himself either - he didn’t countenance the idea of exorcising it from his life. He would have done it again, he realizes, over and over, until the inevitable conclusion, of it being buried in his chest, nicking against his heart hungrily. 

Beside the front door is his backpack, still warm from being taken off. He starts towards it, sudden and near-tripping as he resolves - fearing when the determination will slip backwards and disappear. The knife is shoved in; the zipper is tugged over it.

If Jinki knew more about Kibum than the way he smiled, his heat, the soothing rumble of his voice against his throat, it would be easier. The small moments of their mutual orbit were around the restaurant alone. The prospect of returning the knife there, re-constructing even the smallest piece of that night, scrapes him raw. 

He can’t leave it in his home, though. The world has shrunk to just him and it, and he knows he will be bled dry if it shrinks further. 

* * *

The next day passes unevenly, unable to hold the restless weight of Jinki moving from room to room. He leaves late in the morning and hides in the public library until it closes, pacing among the shelves as he pretends he cannot hear the blood racing beneath his skin. He sleeps and dreams of being sapped dry.

Walking into work on the day after, the hot, accusatory muzzle of the knife presses against his spine. His awareness of it has been demanded with every step forward. When he throws the front door open, the movement of it feels like jostling hot water, threatening to scald his carefully gripping fingers.

There is a drawer at the cashier’s stand, stuffed full of meaningless trash and half-empty pens. He swings the backpack around to his front, ignoring the pain of it rubbing against his still-healing wound. One of the other staff is coming up front; he shoves the knife into the back of the drawer and closes it.

A customer opens the door, and Jinki turns, throwing on a faltering smile. 

“How many?”

* * *

The day moves on, creeping from the afternoon to evening, to night; each piece of it unremarkable in appearance. Jinki runs to and from the back, occupying himself busily with work. In the intermittent, unpredictable pauses, he pushes the alley door open and rolls his shoulders back. The dumpster seeps out a cloying, stubborn smell. Taemin flits in to grab his pay stub, pestering Jinki for a cigarette before he goes. 

Yet - table 4 catches the edges of his eyes at every walk into the dining room; the kitchen walls are untouchable, with their memories of Kibum, pulling them together tightly. The faint barrier he had between his normal life and the stolen moments of Kibum had been thin on its own; the presence of the knife’s pleasure threatened both of those, like a bloated weight held above the pair. He has put all three into a single day, unavoidably close. As a result, anxiety winds tightly around his ankles, and his tongue is dry from the suffocating awareness.

It’s paranoia. He knows it, and is powerless to fight against it. 

The flare of heat against his back as he passes the window to the kitchen - is that the blown air from an oven door being pried open? Or the redundant recollection of something he only imagined in the first place?

A petal wound, scabbing crawling at its edges; the itch beneath his shirt: he is pleading with himself, frantic at the thought of losing the small solace he had found, truly? No, comes the next thought, cynical, angry: he is seeing a respite where there is none. He is lonely, and endangering himself. 

The bell of the front door rings, and with it, one more matter of grating ambiguity: the rattling inside of his head, the sharp, brushing noises of the knife opening and closing in a repetitious plea for him to retrieve it, and give it dominion over his skin once more. 

Or, perhaps, it is one of a hundred other noises that permeate a restaurant full of people. He picks up the tray loaded with silverware and placemats and heads into the dining room. 

He has lost the ability to trust himself, if he ever had it.

* * *

The sun falls beneath the horizon well into the evening. It is a late summer casualty that never fails to surprise Jinki. Soon after that, they begin locking the doors and turning off the lights. The cook who was scheduled the latest nods up in goodbye to Jinki, flipping his transit card between his fingers as he pushes the front door open.

Jinki is left alone, paused until his anxiety propels him forward to the only place he can go. 

The strings of the apron tangle in the wind of his sudden motion. He gives a quick jerk to open the drawer of the cashier’s stand, the receipts inside fluttering in their uncovering. He lets out a breath as his fingers rifle. When they press searchingly against the back, there is the knife, pushed against the splintered interior. 

His heart can finally slow, out of equal measures resignation and relief. He pulls it out and flips it open to lay across his palm. Some measure of ease should wash over him, even as he anticipates the bitterness of failure. 

Once again, he should be back again with Kibum in that neon-black void, led unwaveringly by the knife like a lantern in the dark. There has always been something invoked within him, by such a small, ordinary thing. So - 

Here he stands, expectant. And here the knife is, cold and ordinary and silent. 

The breath vanishes from his chest. There is no great resolution; after all, there has never been a conflict. 

Jinki lets the knife fall and clatter against the counter, then the softer landing on the carpeted floor. He navigates to the bathroom, seeing nothing all the while. The sink fills with water. He lays his forearms across the hairline-cracked porcelain. 

He cries too strongly for words.

* * *

Here is a god, descending to meet a prayer.

* * *

A pair of arms wrap around Jinki from behind, and a breath measures out against his neck. The curve of a ring is warmed between their joined hands.

Jinki has always been a coward. If he opens his eyes, this contact will disappear as another delusion.

In his blindness, he is maneuvered into turning around. Large hands pull against his smaller ones until they fall, brushing against hips that Jinki dreams about. He opens his eyes. When the tears fall away, Kibum’s face swims before him. 

“Hi,” he says. When he smiles, it’s indulgent, like a comet across the night sky. He reaches up, his thumb stopping the line watering down Jinki’s face. 

A noise rustles at their side; Jinki looks, unable to hold Kibum’s loaded gaze. It is the unexpected sight of a plastic bag, decorated with the looping logo of a nearby restaurant. Kibum holds it up, tilts his head towards the dining room.

“Let’s eat.”

* * *

A quick rattle around the fridge, the timely ping of the microwave, and Kibum has a meal as well. The bag he brought was only for Jinki’s purpose, holding a single, hot meal that sent his stomach into growls. 

Kibum drains the rest of his leftover soup in a final gulp. Jinki’s fresh food sits before him, half-eaten. His hunger has shriveled the longer they sit together with no conversation filling the space. Kibum conspicuously says nothing about the last time they sat together, nor makes mention of his missing knife. In the pauses after he drinks, Jinki expects him to say something, but instead he traces his fingers along Jinki’s arm with no hurry. The tip of his shoe occasionally grazes Jinki’s socked ankle. 

“So,” Kibum says abruptly. His features wrench, bit by bit, until they are unrecognizably stern and full of foreboding. Jinki braces himself, for this is what had to happen, all the ugliness being weeded out, before any hopeful beginning could sprout.

There is nothing to it, though, the construction is false; the sternness collapses in the breath after it is erected. Kibum’s clambering, teasing laugh stands on top of its remains. 

Jinki can’t help but laugh too after a moment. It’s a heady, overwhelming realization: he has already been forgiven.

* * *

Kibum lets Jinki finish eating - or rather, he seems to insist on it, waving off any suggestion otherwise. As Jinki toys with his food, he pulls his elbows back, leaning patiently against the seatback; and, once he finally does finish, pressing a napkin against his lips, the time has let him wonder if Kibum has marked the differences in him already. If, when he approached Jinki silently from behind, he had noted the pale, necklaced skin at the nape of his neck, and wondered at the cause. There were still sickly yellow traces of a bruise against his forehead.

If - if Kibum would bear with him again, and lay his hand on his chest - he would find the wound there. What could Jinki’s explanation be, that wouldn’t risk losing him again? 

The thought trots uneasily around his head, but the raw nerves within him gather to match Kibum’s posture, to meet his eyes and let the blush on his cheeks be seen. He has come back, a thought so unmanageably optimistic it had hurt Jinki to think about it. The mirror across the room catches the delicate curve of Kibum’s shoulder shifts, as he moves to stand, and Jinki as he turns his head to follow, always.

“Come with me,” Kibum says. He holds his hand out for Jinki to take. His fluttering worries and anxieties, already faltering by Kibum’s returned presence, seize up at his words, taken aback at their defiance. 

“Is it okay tonight?” he asks. The words are rasped, raw with shock at Kibum's grace.

Kibum looks at him. Affection guides the faint curve of his lips, and forms the crinkle of his brow. 

“Let’s see.” 

Like an echo, Kibum takes Jinki away from the windows, the open room, and guides him into the darkened hallway, but here - his rewind has been granted to him, and he will do it differently. 

Jinki turns. He is clumsy in his calculations, unsteady in the face of the opportunity - but he can find this. He captures Kibum’s lips in his, before another second can pass, unforgivably, without him.

* * *

How long had it been, to have Kibum in his arms, in this space? How long had it been, since Jinki had had more than just the ragged shadow of him? 

Even in Jinki’s fantasies, he couldn’t recreate this space, this wholly real piece of earth, where he fell into Kibum, and Kibum caught him. It had been too wounding, and Jinki too unwilling to imagine happiness occurring in his regular life.

He had wished for the impossible chance to do it over, though. And it had come true, just as impossibly.

This time it is Jinki who keeps moving first, who propels clumsily into Kibum. His need is an overripe fruit, weighing down the branches that are his senses: all he can see, hear, taste, is Kibum. It is a second round of discovery, once again unveiling the mole beneath his ear, the bump of his collarbone, the sweet taste of his tongue. It is pinholes puncturing through a solid door, exposing the dark room inside to light.

The same melody begins to play in a different key - Jinki colliding into Kibum, and Kibum warmly accepting his fumbling advances. He once again has his hand on his narrow, jutting hip; Kibum’s nails draw against his jaw, tracking the sag of it as Jinki gasps. 

As his need drops, his eyelids are heavy with overstimulation, pushing to enclose him in darkness, but Jinki struggles weakly against it. He will keep it all at the forefront, the hectic quarrel of colors and sounds and feeling that all vie for his attention and notice: the exact shade of Kibum’s eyes, the magnet on the fridge door, the shallow, stretched mark on Jinki’s stomach that Kibum finds and follows the uneven line of. Their number will shield him, from the lurking temptation to remember, inopportune, the dark, eroding fantasies that have no place here.

This moment, and this moment alone, Jinki permits to envelop him. Kibum, who is taking control, guiding Jinki’s mouth to open, to let his tongue flick inside teasingly, will be his only compass. It is his chest pressed against Jinki’s; it is his hands - his fingers - his understated breath fluttering and tickling at Jinki’s nose. 

The charity Kibum had to have to come back and try again: it deserves a singular focus from him, a commitment to bear things through, a desire to do so matching it. With all these in mind: 

How could Jinki’s mind go elsewhere? When a dream so searingly unlikely in happiness holds him in his hands, kisses him? 

_And yet -_

Kibum’s hand moves away from the softness that has built on Jinki’s side. It skirts across his navel and skims smoothly over dark hair before hitching up. With it, Jinki’s shirt comes with it, rolling and easy to pull over his head. It will expose his chest, Kibum will press his lips against it in blessing, his palm will find the bandage, he will ask - he will ask - 

Neon flashes before him, and with it a void that pulls them apart. 

Jinki sits, beseeching, before a marked Kibum. 

Here, mark their positions matched, and the difference in blood shed.

“Wait -” Jinki starts, an interjection he has never wanted here, but there is the Kibum before him here, beholding, shaking his head in rejection of Jinki’s neverending deference. And there is the other Kibum, the one he burns to return to, the one who mouths at Jinki’s neck, murmuring sweetly between the graze and nip of teeth. They swirl together, rejection and challenge and provocation and intimacy, and it leaves Jinki, breathless, panicked.

“Stop,” Jinki begs, pushing his hands out in front of him. They block his bared self from the bloodied Kibum in the void, but they push against the Kibum in the restaurant, sending him into the near wall. 

“Someone like you,” Jinki starts, apology already written on his tongue. He does not picture the man before him, the one who brings him food, argues for his right to exist, who sits and breathes and eats and laughs. He pictures a knife, a cut - a god. “And someone like me -”

Kibum sighs, slicing his hand through the air. The sensation of him is still on Jinki’s skin, rippling through his veins like a shark through water. 

“Where is my knife, Jinki?” he asks quietly. “Tell me what you’ve been doing with it.”

He reaches out without stepping closer, his other hand stretched out to point out the hidden mark on Jinki’s chest, the red stigma at the very center of the wound. 

Awareness swells over Jinki, rushes down his throat, as Kibum looks at him, and he is the same, everywhere. He has never been other than himself; he has never tolerated an image for the sake of Jinki’s pleasure.

“What have you done in my name? How did this honor me?”

The wounds, the bruising, the scabs, the blood swelled thick beneath his skin - all they had been were the violent protestations of a body made to deny itself under Kibum’s eye. The knife wound in his chest - that had been Jinki alone, fumbling in the dark, his hands bound and clumsy. None of them had purpose, intent, the exact antipode of the being standing before him.

“Who are you?” Jinki asks, stepping forward. He needs to hear it said, urgent for verbal recognition of what he already knows. The step closes the gap between him and Kibum, and allows him to push his finger painfully against Jinki’s wound, but it permits Jinki the same. 

Intricate scarring unfolds before him, as he pushes aside the loose material of his shirt. The blood has been shed, the skin split and reconciled long ago. 

Kibum is glancing down at where he’s touching him. He lets Jinki trace out the lettering from beginning to end, affirming their perfection, before turning to walk away. 

Jinki is helpless to follow; Kibum’s movements won’t bear deviation. 

Kibum stoops behind the cashier stand. The knife is dancing between his fingers as he stands back up and approaches Jinki. He brings the open blade up to his mouth: the edge of it presses obscenely against his lower lip. The lick of saliva still there, from Jinki’s kisses, leaks onto the metal. 

“What are you doing?” 

“Shhh,” Kibum gently rejects the feint for what it is. “You know already.”

He brings the knife down and puts it in Jinki’s hand. Around him he moves, until he once again embraces Jinki from behind and moves him along the path. Resting his chin on Jinki’s shoulder, Kibum makes a soft, tolerant noise when they stop in front of the mirror. The sink presses wetly against Jinki’s waist. 

It can’t be known who moves the knife first, but it’s undoubtedly Kibum who uses it to flick the bandage off. Exposed, inviting questions, the wound forms the perfect reception for Kibum to lay the knife there again. 

Kibum’s scars slither their request against his back, and he wonders how he ever thought it wouldn’t come to this. 

“Will it hurt?” he asks. 

It has always been more than the pain of a knife. Kibum knows. He has always known the fragility of Jinki’s self. 

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Kibum says. He is deliberate; he presses a kiss to Jinki’s shoulder that feels like a promise sworn only to his flesh. “No one else will have your life. No one else can do this on your behalf, and spare you the decision.”

Hesitant, Jinki reaches to pull his shirt up and over his head. Kibum leans away to allow him; returning, his breath issues warm against the tension in Jinki’s neck. His words thrum indignantly at Jinki’s anxiety, like vibrations to an earthy clod, as he continues.

“You can know yourself truly. There’ll be love and joy, and pain and sadness, and it will be yours only to recognize and form. Master of your own skin - your own _self_. What you do with it is only limited to what you see fit to do.”

Kibum releases his hold on the knife. It is now Jinki’s, and Jinki’s alone. It pulses in time with the blood, the blood he has yet to accept - control - _spill_ in truth. 

Jinki slices the knife, splitting the wound squatting on his skin in half. There is a dreadful, giddy silence.

* * *

There is blood blooming from Jinki’s chest. It forms trails, paths, along the bank of his body, growing more complex with each subsequent stroke of the blade. There is little charm in it, and even less skill. 

It is an illegible mess that answers the question. 

There is surrender to himself, and no one else, so marked, indelible, into his flesh. 

_“Have you done this for me?”_

_“No.”_

* * *

There are four lines against his chest, the skeleton of letters, when he pauses. His own request wants for a response.

“Tell me a story,” Jinki asks, his words quieter than the sound of blood. It’s still a mystery, his own skin; he has only just cut through to find the truth beneath. “Tell me why - please. Help me.”

Kibum’s voice is thoughtful. 

“Here is a short tale. There was a man. He was cruelly bound, and so talented was the binding that he thought it was his deserved birthright.”

Warmth trickles down against Jinki’s belly; it pools inside the shallowness of his navel. 

“He was blinded. He could not see those who wanted to help him, who reached to help, to undo his bindings, and so he twisted away. He was so frantic to escape their imagined cruelty, that he only hurt himself further.”

His breath stutters in the wake of shuddering regret, but he pushes on. He severs skin and fat. 

“When he did move, it was out of instinct. Like an animal in a cave, he searched for an exit without ever knowing what one would look like.”

The blood seeps to the divot beneath his waist, and courses between his legs. His cock slickens with it. 

“Until one day, he was found by a god. And the god gave him a knife, and a guiding hand.”

Jinki finishes; he drops the knife and reaches his blood-covered hand out, blindly seeking Kibum’s. 

* * *

When Kibum’s hand finds his, closing around it like a blanket, Jinki collapses towards him. His body sags with the effort expended, and his god catches him. 

He did not move with the steady, confident hand Kibum had demonstrated; his cuts were varyingly shallow and deep, with unclean edges. The thin connectors of tissue break further when he shifts. But the deed is done. The body has been marked to be his own. 

His blood smears across Kibum’s healed chest, like a memory broken free. 

“All this time,” Jinki says. “All this time - “ 

He cannot finish the thought, but Kibum does not reward his regret with validation. His hand finds Jinki’s chest, acknowledging the victory won there. 

“It was your time to take,” he says simply. “Now you move forward.”

“But I don’t know how to do that.”

“No one does,” Kibum says, voice rich with memory. “But they do, all the time. Every day, they find a way to be different than the person they were the day before. And so will you.”

Like a tree branch bending under the sudden weight of leaves that have always been there, Jinki sits at Kibum’s knees. He lays his head down on his leg, and closes his eyes as the god combs his hair between blood-stained fingers. He can feel the exhaustion of it all, like static, at the edges of his senses.

“I have a long way to go, don’t I?” he asks. Kibum’s touch stills for a moment, before resuming. 

“Yes, you do,” he answers. He speaks with a warm, blunt kindness, when he continues: “You get to do more than you’ve done before. Experience things, places - people. People will get to know you for you, even as you get to know yourself. You’ll learn to love yourself. The people who love you now will only be able to love you better. And you - you, Lee Jinki, you think of yourself as such an old man, so _worn_ , but how can you be so old when you’ve only just been born?”

Jinki shivers as Kibum gently touches his chest, and leans his head up to look at him. Kibum looks down at him, his head shaking in amazement.

“You will never stop changing. You were never meant to reach an end.”

At the curiosity that twiddles naively onto Jinki’s face, Kibum’s expression changes as well, becoming a little more like the man Jinki first saw, playing with his phone.

“Believe me, or else your head will explode like that,” he says, snapping his fingers for dire emphasis, and Jinki laughs with his whole body, sending still wet streaks of blood shivering into new directions. When Kibum giggles softly too, closing itself off with a sigh, Jinki’s heart seizes up at the all too human sounds of it. 

“I’m not going to see you again,” he says, speaking aloud his realization. Kibum affirms with a low noise. 

“No,” he adds onto it. There’s a simple, accepted sadness in that one word that strikes Jinki square in the face. It is terribly unfair, and with it a small amount of guilt: he journeys forward, only the latest to leave Kibum alone. 

“You,” Kibum says, suddenly leaning over, burying his nose into Jinki’s hair and whispering. “You will be happy, and I will be a waystation for that. I’ll be fine, old man.”

The way his tongue curls the last two words, with mature, teasing affection -

It feels so much like what they had, what they could have been, that Jinki leans his head back, eager to find Kibum’s eyes. _Courage_ , a staggering luxury has at last found him, and creates the formation of his lips, the position of his tongue:

“Is it okay?” he slowly, meaningfully asks, and, Kibum, Kibum knows him. His smile is coy and lovely. 

“It is.”

For the final time, they meet for a kiss.

* * *

The blood that dots Kibum’s face, hangs like a teardrop at the corner of his lips, once ran through Jinki’s veins. He takes it back, welcoming it on his tongue. The bare glance of it only makes him part his lips wider, eager for more. 

It’s more than their dalliances in the cautious seclusion of the closed restaurant, or even this void, when it was still a teasing, dangerous unknown. Now, there is no such thing as unknowns - Kibum is true, and so is Jinki. The openness, the honesty of it, suffuses the space between them, around them, inside them with warmth.

By now, Jinki knows the feel of Kibum’s hand, settling loosely at his neck. The track of it down, to find the fresh paths in his chest, makes him shiver with happy anticipation alone, thoughts of fear and risk well exorcised. The tips of nails drag across. It is as though Kibum himself had willed his skin to open. 

Pleasure lazily sweeps to his cock, spurring its jump at attention. 

The hum Kibum lets out buzzes against the fine hairs of Jinki’s neck. The noise itself is the only warning Jinki gets, for Kibum to reach behind his back, joining his hands in a loop and pulling him upwards. He ends up kneeling between Kibum’s parted legs, steadying himself with one flat hand against his thigh. The god smiles wide against his jaw, _tsk_ ing when Jinki makes to move his hand away. 

“Let me touch you,” Kibum asks. Jinki realizes with a thrill that he is asking because he can ask. Jinki hasn’t run yet. The shadow of fear has been banished, evaporated in the heat of blood. 

“Yes - please - “ he says, in between gasps. It is in the moment before Kibum touches him that he remembers the delta of blood against his abdomen, the mess of sweat and slick and blood that his cock must be. 

Kibum’s grip slips from base to tip like an arrowshot. Jinki chokes. The god laughs at him, rich and dark, causing an embarrassing blush to diffuse across Jinki’s face. He swallows down the apology that involuntarily constructs, and instead buries his head against Kibum’s chest. The scars scratch against his cheek.

“Do you want to tell me how you like it?” Kibum asks against his ear. His fingertips play along his length. "You can tell me how to touch you, and I will."

"I - I'm not sure," he says. 

The references he could use, his own private, shameful pleasures, do not fit into this place. 

"I trust you," he says instead. Kibum makes an understanding noise, and moves his grip back down to his base. 

"Tell me when," Kibum orders. He waits patiently for Jinki's wordless affirmation before he starts to move again. The man folds against him at the renewed sensation; he mouths at Kibum’s skin, kissing his long healed scars and tasting the ghost of wounds. 

At last, he doesn’t go anywhere else when the sensations take over him. When he closes his eyes, Kibum is still there beneath him; when he opens them, the wash of neon light glows against his skin. There is nowhere else to go - no one else he wants - no one else he wishes to be - and so his mind finally roots. 

The mole below Kibum’s ears disappears beneath Jinki’s reverent kiss; he suckles at the delicate skin, when Kibum moves his head obligingly back. The purpling when he pulls away - Kibum running his thumb across his leaking head - he dizzies with sensation, but remains, intractably, _present_. 

“Can I -” Jinki starts to ask, his mind brimming over with possibilities. His face flushes with want as he struggles to narrow down to what he can feasibly do. “Can I suck you?”

Kibum moves so that they are facing each other again; kisses the center of his forehead, right at his bruise, as if to heal it.

“Of course you can.”

Jinki leans back, as Kibum moves to pull himself out. He has been healed over for so long; and yet Jinki still expected there to be blood decorating Kibum’s cock, his mouth watering anxiously with expectation.

“You could use your own,” Kibum suggests gently. It shakes Jinki out of his stillness. When he nods, he moves to use his own hand to collect it, but Kibum beats him to it, reaches out to slide his hand across his chest. He pinches lightly, before he pulls away. When he reaches down to rub the transferred blood onto his cock, it juts through the tight circle formed by his fingers. 

Jinki can only stare at it: the length of it, the dark blood smeared over in a perfect mosaic. 

“Whenever you’re ready,” Kibum encourages. Jinki bends down, savoring the view until he’s close enough for his breath to shiver across the bubble forming at the opening at the tip. He doesn’t have practical knowledge for this, for either role - what he does have, portrayals and jokes and secondhand, aren’t the guideposts he would want to use. 

Kibum’s hand is patient at the back of his neck, and that soothes him and stirs his will to try. He does know what he wants: he opens his mouth and closes his lips around the head, softer than a lily. Kibum lets out a purr of encouragement. 

Jinki experiments with the feel of it, wanting to become more used to the pressure against his lips, the earthiness of it mixed with the bare hint of metal. When he lets his mouth open wider, to allow more of Kibum’s cock to weigh on his tongue, he has to shift to accommodate, all too cautious of his teeth, the tension in his neck. 

It’s tentative, unsure, after doing all these minor adjustments, that he goes to try to stimulate with his tongue. He lets out a small lick, and the phantom metallic taste bursts into solidity, like he has his tongue against the blade of the knife itself. He can only groan at the sudden, violently roiling pleasure in his gut. 

Kibum’s fingers curl at the ends of his hairs, twisting around like webs. Jinki closes his eyes and continues, taking in as he can. There are still a myriad of things he is learning - the feeling of a twitch of pleasure in his mouth; the soft, velvety layer that his lips brush over; and, the very salt of him that comes out so slight, and reticent, that Jinki’s greedy for more.

He can only do so much - he can’t take him in very deep, choking when he moves too quickly. Kibum runs his hand over Jinki’s hair, patiently letting him take a moment to compose himself. He presses his cheek against his leg and watches the saliva and blood drip off of Kibum’s cock. 

“Do you like it?” he asks, curiously, and Jinki confesses a wet “yes” against his thigh. 

“Go as long as you want to,” Kibum says, and Jinki takes him up on the offer. The hastiness and the hesitation are deliberately denied; instead, he lets himself sink into the experience unthinkingly. He permits only his senses to transmit their signals; they will be the bright flares in his memory for the future. After all, this is the first and only time he will get to taste Kibum, and the first and only time Kibum will be inside of him.

His knees, pressed against the ground, falter. He struggles to swallow back the flooding over of emotions. 

“Old man, do you want me to come in your mouth?” 

The thought of it makes Jinki groan, even as he feels a little uncertain. He holds still, and nods the bare amount, the movement pressing his tongue flat against the underside of Kibum’s cock. Sweat is bursting out beneath the line of his jaw from the unfamiliar posture and motions.

“Don’t worry,” he says, ingratiating his hand in the space between Jinki’s mouth and the thistle-growth of hair scattered at his base. “Hold your mouth at the tip - and just move up and down there.”

Jinki follows his direction, and Kibum begins stroking himself, quickly and eagerly. He takes note of the pace, memorizing the rhythm of it, the increased tension running through his muscles. It all moves so much faster, that he wants to protest, but in equal measure he doesn’t want to move and take himself out of any moment. 

Kibum seeps against his tongue, and warns - “ _Jinki…_ ” - from the back of his throat: he has enough time to pull away if he so wants. But when the rasping, hungry noise follows shortly, Jinki’s mouth is open and waiting to be filled. The flavor of Kibum is rich, earthy, and is flattened by the iron that follows. 

He wants it - he wants to keep it with him. He swallows past his uncertainty. As it warms on the way down his throat, he shivers.

Kibum draws him close, and lets him rest against his stomach. Jinki watches his cock twitch and soften through half-closed eyes. All the blood he had smeared across its span has long disappeared, reclaimed in Jinki’s attentions. 

Jinki’s own cock pulses in recognition and renewed hunger as Kibum lets out a satisfied breath. 

“You’re making me want to keep you all to myself,” he says. Jinki nuzzles against his skin, pink with pride. “Don’t get so excited, old man. This space isn’t meant for you to stay in. Now, come here.”

He pulls Jinki up and settles back as he positions the man in a straddle over his lap. His thick cock pushes against Kibum’s belly; the blood flaking and caught by the hair stretching down from his navel. 

“You’ve waited a long time already,” he says as he holds Jinki’s gaze. His other hand moves back, slow enough to allow himself to be stopped. Jinki doesn’t ask him to, though his breath starts to hitch as his fingers reach the edges of his crease. Kibum stops there and shifts their bodies closer together. Aching for him, Jinki leans down for a kiss. 

The flicker of a tongue, the slightest nip of the teeth, and Kibum touches Jinki’s cock. The blood there he finds to have dried, so he puts his fingers in his mouth without hesitation, working to gather as much saliva as he can. His next touch works along him smoothly and Jinki shudders in relief. 

The urge to delay it again hits him - if he can somehow stay in this moment, resist the magnetic pull towards climax, then he can stay with Kibum - but Kibum tuts against his chin, as if he can hear his thoughts and feel his reluctance. 

He won’t last a long time, not with Kibum’s fingers circling around him, not with blood scored like ash around his mouth, not with the occasional ending he gives to each stroke - his thumb pressing against his tip, stopping the steady leak there. And even without that, there is the ominous grip of his other hand, the fat and muscle and skin he has his nails perched against, the insinuation of what he could do, at Jinki’s word.

When their lips meet again, Kibum pulls him closer. Jinki’s cock presses into the junction of his thigh. The rough hair bristles against his length. There is only sensation, with no piece of him escaping attention. 

The moment arrives in a slow, inevitable crest, a wave spotted leagues off. It is watched and wondered over and tracked, until it finally crashes against the shore that is Jinki’s body. It spreads as thin as water over him; it is light and expansive, undeniably present as it soaks into him. 

He finishes quietly across Kibum’s hand and stretches out in languid satisfaction, in a seemingly endless span of time, in the infinite space of Kibum’s affection. He is the shoreline after a wave, left to recover beneath the sky. 

“Jinki,” he feels Kibum say. He grumbles against his shoulder, unable to stop himself from showing his weakness. Kibum kisses his temple, sighs with his whole body and holds him closer for a brief moment.

The void around them is slowly tinting redder and redder. Kibum disentangles their limbs, arranging Jinki until he can again behold his face, the kindly, human eyes of a god. Jinki wants nothing else than to kiss him once more. 

“Be kind to yourself, old man,” he admonishes.

Jinki lunges forward. In the moment before the red erases everything that has ever been in this space, he can feel Kibum’s lips beneath his, the gentle curve of his smile.

* * *

The restaurant doesn’t open until late morning. The sight of the sun rising through the side windows, the orange light laying across the lattice, is a disorientation. 

Jinki wakes up, his hand groping for a companion as it clutches against the end of table 4. His jaw cracks as he sits up. The side of his face is stiff and squashed from where it had lain against the lacquered wood.

His mind is a fog, with phantoms of sensation skittering over his body that urge him to remember what lies just beyond reach, formless and faint. He lands himself in the bathroom on autopilot. Following some instinctive feeling, he pulls aside the collar of his shirt.

There is a petal buried, overwritten with pink scarring. How could he have forgotten, even for a moment? 

The knife is laying in the sink, its open blade stretched across the drain. There is dried blood against its length. When Jinki picks it up, there is nothing that beats within him, wailing to get out. The fog has dissipated in its shine; it allows him to remember the task he had undertaken, the guiding hand, the brief delight of being able to love Kibum, and be loved. 

There is sadness. It lies at the shell of his eyes, the trembling turn of his fingers. Yet - 

“Thank you,” he says. He presses the knife to his lips in a kiss, closes it and places it in his pocket. It is nothing more than a token, a reminder of gratitude and joy and rebirth. 

Master of his own skin, Jinki Lee goes home.

* * *

_jinkil: can we talk?_

_jjongd: i’d like that_

* * *

There is a man. There is a god. 

The god watches the man be free.

**Author's Note:**

> an immense thank you to my two betas, conniecorleone and mousie.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [칼부림](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27529987) by [quagmireisadora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quagmireisadora/pseuds/quagmireisadora)




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